


Blood ties

by Redchange15



Series: Blood ties [1]
Category: The Old Guard (Comics), The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Amnesia, Angst, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Canon Gay Relationship, Canon-Typical Violence, Established Relationship, Immortal Husbands Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova, M/M, POV Nicky | Nicolò di Genova, Sarcasm, Temporary Amnesia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-22
Updated: 2020-11-25
Packaged: 2021-03-04 17:40:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 28,020
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25450288
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Redchange15/pseuds/Redchange15
Summary: He wakes up in a hospital in Varna, Bulgaria, on a Thursday.He has no idea how he got there, or who he is.As he tries to gather himself, a policeman walks in. They explain that he was found on the outskirts of city in the dock. The policeman wants to know who he is and how he got there. They also want to know why they’d found him in clothes that were covered in blood.They tell him his name is Niccolo.Niccolo would like to know the answers to the policeman’s questions as well.
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Series: Blood ties [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1843354
Comments: 155
Kudos: 1141





	1. 1

He wakes up in a hospital in Varna, Bulgaria, on a Thursday.

He has no idea how he got there, or who he is. But he doesn’t think the clothes he’s in are his. The sweater has полиция emblazoned across it, and some part of his brain tells him that means police, he doesn’t know how he knows that.

As he tries to gather himself, a policeman walks in. They explain that he was found on the outskirts of city in the docks, washed ashore and face down. They thought he was dead originally, but somehow, he was still alive and miraculous uninjured.

The policeman wants to know who he is and how he got there. They also want to know why they’d found him in clothes that were covered in blood.

They tell him his name is Niccolo.

Niccolo would like to know the answers to the policeman’s questions as well.

He explains in broken Bulgarian that he doesn’t know. He searches in his mind for anything, but comes up blank.

The police and hospital staff clearly have no idea what to do with him. He hasn’t committed any crime and he isn’t injured, so they have to let them go. They tell him that he’ll need to come back the next day, but for now, he’s a free man. They give him back the things he was found with.

This includes; a Spanish drivers’ licence, where he finds out that his full name is Niccolò Genova. He shortens it to Nicky in his head for no other reason that it feels right. He also has a business card for a hotel that he’s never heard of in Malta, a key to somewhere he’s can’t remember and 100 euros in small notes. He also has a wickedly sharp switch blade.

He doesn’t know why he would need such a blade, but it’s well made so he pockets it. 

He has no idea where to go.

A kind nurse points him in the direction of a cheap hotel. It’s run down and next door to what Nicky assumes is a whore house. But they don’t ask questions, or for an ID and at least the sheets on the bed appear clean.

As he sits on the bed and fights the impending urge to panic. Beyond his name, he doesn’t know anything else about himself. He tries to wash his clothes in the sink, but it’s a lost cause with dirt, blood and clumps of stuff coming off. There are also tears and holes galore. He wonders what could have caused all of that but left him without a scratch.

That night he dreams. He dreams of a Man. He dreams of fighting this Man, over and over again. He dreams of being killed by this Man, over and over again. He wakes knowing what it feels like to hold his guts in his hands as he dies, with the Man looking down in utter hatred and contempt. He wakes gasping for air and checks his body for scars.

There are none.

A headache starts, and sits in his head like a content cat in the sun, unwilling to move at any cost.

The second day, he follows his gut and avoids the police. He steals a phone and a wallet from some man on the tram. It turns out he has the skills of a good pickpocket, and isn’t quite sure what that say’s about himself.

He spends the afternoon buying the cheapest clothes he can find, and sweet talks an old waitress in Russian (!) into letting him use the wi-fi for free, frantically googling his name and all its combinations to see if anything comes up.

There’s nothing.

Nothing in English, Spanish, Italian, Bulgarian or Russian. According to the internet, he doesn’t exist. The only thing he can find is about a man called Nicolò di Genova, who lived 100 years ago in Malta in a house by the sea. The house is beautiful, but the information is useless.

Nicky isn’t sure if this is a good or a bad thing. On one hand, it’s good he’s not a wanted man, but at the same time, no one seems to be searching for him. He wonders if he has a family, friends, a partner. As the evening draws on the waitress becomes less friendly, so he leaves the phone and a large tip. Better not to be found, the voice in the back of his head tells him. For some unexplainable reason, the voice sounds female.

He dreams of the Man for the second night. This time the dreams are worse.

He kills the Man this time. Slashing his sword across his chest, and feels warm blood spurt on his face. He watches as the life goes from the Mans eyes. He watches the dead Man raise, and he bashes his skull in with a rock until the head resembles a rotten fruit left too long in the sun.

He still has no idea who this Man is.

The third day with nothing better to do, his money dwindling and a headache that won’t go; he does the sensible thing by walking into the first bar he sees. While making a single-handed effort to drink all of Bulgaria’s vodka, he watches the flickering TV in the corner as the newsreader talks about a massive explosion three months ago just outside of Kraveno, north of Varna. The newsreader is vague about what happened, but a warehouse on the coast goes up in flames on the wobbly footage recorded by the mobile of some random bystander. Half the warehouse gets blown into the sea, and the explosion leaves nothing behind.

The newscaster say’s faulty gas works. Nicky balls bullshit in French (!) to himself, and a voice that he doesn't recognise tells him that Gas pipes like that don’t go boom unless they’ve got help.

Due to the vodka, it takes him a moment to realise he can add French is his list of languages, and that he somehow has an intimate knowledge of explosives.

Both those facts just confuse him.

By kick-out time, he’s run through most of his money and seems to be in a losing battle with gravity. He stumbles past the whorehouse as a slim young lady touts outside. She has dark skin and tight curly dark hair in a bob cut.

She says her name is Katya and she charges €30 an hour. Nicky negotiates her down to twenty and gets 2 hours. He fucks her from behind in his hotel room, hands griping her hips, and blames the alcohol when he can’t cum. She’s nice about it and doesn’t say anything. He gives her the last of his money and she leaves, giving him a kiss on the cheek as she goes.

She tells him his Bulgarian is awful, and that his accent is Italian. Not Spanish. She would know, she was smuggled there a couple of years ago.

That night he dreams of dying again. This time he’s standing in the middle of a battle, five seconds away from shitting himself in fear, and surrounded by the dead or the dying. He’s scared in a way that he hasn’t felt before. He’s never died before.

The Man wades a bloody trail through the battlefield, killing men all around him and he’s coming for Nicky. Nicky weaves under a scimitar and thrusts upwards with his sword. The Man looks surprised, almost impressed, as he coughs up blood and dies. He slashes down with the last of his strength and cuts Nicky down to the bone from shoulder to hip.

Nicky dies.

He wakes up and barely manages to haul himself to the bathroom before he vomits up all the vodka. Then he just keeps vomiting as the smell of the battlefield lingers in the bathroom. He reaches up to grab the glass of water on the sink and misses. It drops and shatters.

Drunkenly he tries to pick up the pieces and cuts himself.

Swearing in Arabic (!), he goes to wash it clean and finds that the cut has gone. He looks at his hand, the blood still tacky on his finger- but there’s no wound.

What the fuck?

He doesn’t feel drunk anymore. With a detached sense of reality, he picks up another shard of glass and holds it to his hand. Pushing hard enough to draw blood, he cuts across his hand. The other edge of the wound has already begun healing by the time he pulls the glass shard across his hand.

He inspects his hand under the light, there’s no scar, no mark at all.

He spends the next few hours testing this new discovery. He wonders how far he can push this; how big and deep can he can make the cuts go before he can’t come back from it.

At least it explains the blood on the clothes and why they found him in but no wounds. One of a mysteries solved, only another thousand left to go. 

The next day he goes to the local library to see if they have an answer for what he is, because he certainly isn’t human.

He finds nothing helpful, but he does discover the move Highlander, which for reasons entirely unknown to him make him smile.

He’s making the slow journey back to the hotel when Katya pulls him into an alley two blocks away. She tells him that two women and a man were at the hotel looking for him. She gives descriptions of them and he knows that the Man she’s talking about is the one who he dreams of each night.

A number of things suddenly become very clear to him.

He’s being hunted.

They probably want to finish the job they started. Nicky doesn’t know who they are, and he’s not going to find out.

She hands him over his €40, and tells him that it will get him to Odessa by ferry. He thanks her and leaves. There’s nothing in that hotel room but nightmares and blood stains.

He takes a bus to Plovdiv instead of the ferry north, and then begs, borrows, steals and barters his way through Central Eastern Europe for months until he reaches Tirana in Albania. His only companion is the now familiar headache, and endless nightmares.

Sometimes he doesn’t dream he’s killing the Man, sometimes he’s killing other people, and often they’re killing him. Sometimes, if he’s lucky, he has good nightmares. They’re not good dreams, but good nightmares. Where he’s still stuck in some shithole war, but instead of senseless murder he’s able to help. It’s not much, merely placing plasters on wounds that need bandages, but at least it’s something.

It’s pitiful how much he likes those dreams.

Most days, he dreams of the Man. Nicky isn’t an idiot, he knows these dreams are probably bastardised memories, but when he wakes up covered in sweat and checking that he still has all his limbs, he wonders what he’s done that is so awful, that the Man wants to kill Nick over and over again.

In Tirana, after one bad dream too many it all becomes too much. In a fit of morose despair he buys some local Rakia, enough paracetamol to down a small horse and takes his knife to his arms. Two deep cuts that run from his wrist to his elbow.

He wakes up a day later to a healed body, a nasty hangover and flooded bathroom.

He comes to think of himself as cursed, because what’s the point of living forever if it’s only to be alone and hunted?

He heads to the coast, towards the city of Dures with a vague idea of going towards Italy, then maybe Malta. Because why the fuck not? He can see if the hotel knows anything about him.

He finds work on a building site, there’s little health and safety and everyone is mostly an illegal immigrant, but it’s cash in hand and it’s not like he’s got anything to be worried about. Everyone keeps to themselves, but over the weeks he becomes close to a few of them. He gets on with the Tunisians particularly well. They laugh and tease him good naturedly over his strange old-fashioned turns of phrases. 

He tells them he’s a student of history. The private joke amuses him more than it has any right to. He has no idea now long he’s been alive.

He becomes closest to Hassan, who says he is from Syria, but uses what Nicky knows is Palestinian slang. He says he wants to be an artist, and in the evenings he spray-paints the skeletons of the buildings he’s helped built, while drinking and regaling Nicky with increasingly rude and absurd stories.

He’s full of hope for the future and he makes Nicky laugh. He is slim, has short curly hair and a well-trimmed beard. Nicky thinks he is beautiful.

Two weeks later, Hassan gives him a blow job down the back of an alley behind the bar in-between overflowing garbage cans. It’s messy and clumsy, done with little skill, and Nicky cums almost embarrassingly quickly. He goes back to Hassan’s, and fucks him from behind into the mattress with one hand gripping Hassan’s hair and his face buried in his shoulder. They don’t once kiss.

When it’s over, he’s not invited to stay the night and he doesn’t want to. He leaves with a small smile from Hassan and Nicky tells him that the best way to get to Germany will be via the coast. Nicky doesn’t know how he knows this, but he knows it’s true. He wishes him luck and knows he won’t see him tomorrow. Tomorrow Hassan will be gone like so many others before him.

As he walks towards his own shithole accommodation, he wonders if this is all he’ll ever get. Moments of respite and flashes of connection to another person.

That night the dreams change.

Instead of murder and death, he dreams of the Man and flashes of skin. He dreams of touches, soft kisses and fingers on hips clutched tight enough to bruise. He wakes up achingly hard and confused. Lonely for a feeling he doesn’t understand. How can he dream of killing the Man, but also want him in the most carnal of ways? What kind of pitiful person wants to be fucked, and fuck, their murderer?

He forces himself to stay awake until sunrise and gets to the building site early. Keeping his head down and focused on the task. The others don’t ask where Hassan is. They know how it goes, one day you’re here, the next gone.

At lunch his boss pulls him aside and tells him he’s working the far side of the site for the afternoon. Long shadows fall as he makes his way over and he makes short work of the wall he’s helping bring down. The wall is old and useless, making way for new things as all things should. Nothing is meant to last forever.

He’s so pathetically lost in his own thoughts that he doesn’t hear the footsteps behind him until it’s too late.

“Nicolò…”

He knows this voice. He knows it like he knows his own.

He turns and comes face to face with the Man he’s been dreaming of for all these months.

He will not be hunted anymore. He will not go quietly into that good night.

Without thinking he runs forward, aims low and tackles the man to the ground. Using the element of surprise, he gets a good punch into the ribs, and uses it as a distraction to grab his switch blade out, bringing his other arm down on the man’s throat, aiming to at least give him a quick death.

The Man seems to realise what he’s doing before Nicky knows himself, and throws up his arms to stop the blade coming down.

“Why are you here?” Nicky growls, pushing all his weight down on his knife, bringing it mere millimetres from the man’s neck.

“I wasn’t going to risk losing you a second time” The Man says. 

“Why are you trying to kill me?! Why are you hunting me?! What have I done to deserve this?” Nicky growls.

The Man’s eyes widen in shock, suddenly unconcerned with the knife against his throat, “Nicky, why would I do that?!”

“You’ve done it enough times. Why would it be any different now?” He say’s furiously. Suddenly so angry at the whole fucked up situation that he isn’t paying attention to his surroundings.

Out of the corner of his eye he sees a black woman barrelling around the corner towards him, she slams into him, forcing him off the Man. He rolls with the motion and kicks her off into the wall. She gets back up, arm already healing when Nicky knows it should be broken. He adjusts his knife in his hands. He feels like a caged animal, but he knows with bone deep certainty that he can take them. He is a fighter and he will not be beaten. 

“Nile. Don’t!” The Man shouts as the women moves towards him.

Another woman and man round the corner. The woman is tall with short cropped hair and beautiful in an austere way. “We don’t have time for this. They’ll call the police,” she says pulling a gun out from behind her.

“ANDY DON’T YOU DARE…!” The Man shouts, and rushes towards her.

She points her gun at Nicky, “sorry Nicky,” say says.

She shoots him point blank in the head.


	2. 2

He wakes to a hushed argument happening over him. His headache is back in full force.

They’re in a warehouse of some sort and Nicky’s arms are chained to a cot. No one is paying any attention to him.

The Man is standing with his back to him, facing the three others. He’s within stabbing distance if Nicky could move his arms. Nicky realises that he’s seen flashes of the others before in his dreams, but he didn’t recognise them until now.

Better to play dead for now and plan an escape.

“I don’t care if you’re mortal now Andy. If you do that again, I will kill you.” The Man Nicky has been dreaming of says. His tone is one of cold and deadly fury.

The short-haired woman, Andy, doesn’t apologise.

“Why did he attack us?” the black girl, Nile- Nicky remembers, asks.

“He doesn’t remember us.” The man in the corner says, he reeks of booze. “Which I suppose why his behaviour these past months makes sense now.”

“Shut up Booker,” The Man says, fury leaking from his voice.

“I don’t get it, we’ve all been shot in the head or killed before, and it hasn’t messed us up like this before. So why now?” Nile asks.

“He wasn’t just shot in the head” Andy says tiredly, “he was caught in the middle of an explosion and thrown into the sea. Most of his body would have been vaporised, and then he spent a month drowning over and over again. That’s enough to scramble anyone, even Nicky."

The Man looks like he wants to punch something. Nile looks like she is going to be sick.

“He’s awake,” Booker says from the corner. The other three turn to look at him.

“How are you feeling?” The Man asks softly, he moves to come closer, but Andy holds out a hand to stop him. Smart woman.

“Where am I?” Nicky answers back.

“Safe.” Andy replies.

“Then why am I chained up?” he retorts.

“Because you tried to kill two of my people.” Nicky can’t really argue with that. “What do you remember?” she asks.

Nicky’s silence speaks volumes.

Brooker swears quietly in French, Andy doesn’t give anything away, Nile looks worried… and the Man… he looks devastated.

Over the next 5 minutes, Andy proceeds to spin him what seems an absurd story about being part of an immortal group of soldiers who have fought side by side for centuries. She tells him that his name is Niccolò di Genova, that he was a crusader born the turn of the century, and he’s been fighting for just short of a thousand years.

Nicky wants to call bullshit, but then he is currently alive even after being shot in the head. So, the immortality part may be true. However, he can’t understand how he could be part of a team where at least a fifth of it has been actively trying to kill him.

“If we’re all so close then why do I only have memories of being killed by this one over and over again.” He jerks his head towards the Man. Andy’s hand on the Man’s shoulder becomes a death grip.

“My name is Yusuf Ibrahim ibn Muhammad ibn Al-Kaysani, for the last century you’ve called me Joe.” He says, voice almost catching at the end.

Yusuf ibn Muhummad ibn Al-Kaysani.

Joe.

The Man has a name.

“Do you still want to kill me?” Nicky asks bluntly.

His face breaks and Nicky thinks he looks heartbroken. “Never”.

A tense silence takes the room, each waiting for the other side to move. Finally, Nicky gestures to his hands. “If we’re friends, untie me.”

The Man steps closer. He takes a key and undoes the handcuffs. Nicky sits up and looks at the Man kneeling beside him. He makes no effort to move, and Nicky thinks he has his chance.

He gets one solid punch into the Man’s face before Andy’s arm snaps forward and slams his head into the wall beside the cot. He hears a crack, feels the blood running down the back of his head and his vision dims as the Man reaches out to catch him.

The last thing he hears is Booker swearing.

\---

The next time Nicky wakes he’s in a different room. It’s night time, and it leaches the world of colour within the room, making everything myriad shades of grey. He’s still tied up, but it’s only one arm this time and it’s attached to an extended chain. 

It’s a nice upgrade, but he’s still a prisoner.

The Man is sitting in a single folded metal chair on the other side of the room. It can’t be comfortable and he looks like he’s been there a while.

He’s also out of reach.

“Where are the others?”

“Booker and Nile are sleeping, Andy is trying hard not to lose her temper with Copley and see if there’s anything that can be done to help you.”

“Who’s Copley?”

“A friend.”

“I thought I was supposed to be your friend, and look at how you’re treating me.” Nicky gestures to his chained-up hand.

“Copley doesn’t try to punch me in the face.”

“Have you tried to kill him as well?”

The Man gives a bitter chuckle, “only because you asked me not to”. And that, that answer stops the next bitchy retort coming from Nicky’s mouth.

Silence comes between them, and while the Man seems comfortable with it, it makes Nicky’s skin crawl.

“Which do you prefer- Joe or Yusuf?” He asks to break the silence.

The Man says nothing but stares at him. Nicky has no idea what he was thinking.

“Yusuf, I’d prefer if you called me Yusuf. It’s the name you’ve known me by longest.”

Ok- Yusuf it was. It still meant nothing to Nicky.

“If you promise not to punch me, can I come closer?” Yusuf asks. “You still have blood in your hair from where Andy bashed it, and it’ll matt if it dries, which just makes it harder to get it out. You’ve always hated that.” He gestures to sink and cloth to the side of the room and the cloth which already has some stains on it. Nicky assumes they used that to wipe away the blood when he got shot in the face at point-blank range.

“How do I know it’s not an excuse?’ Nicky asks warily. 

“I would not do anything to harm you. You have my word”. A moment passes.

With his chained hand, Nicky feels the back of his head and finds it coming away tacky with drying blood. He nods, and Yusuf lets out a sigh, it sounds like relief. He wets a towel and walks towards with a bowl in the other, clearly cataloguing his movements like Nicky is some type of caged animal ready to attack him.

Which on second thoughts is pretty accurate.

He sits on the edge of the cot, and one arm curls around Nicky’s waist to bring him slightly forward, while the other reaches around and slowly tries to get the blood of out his hair.

It feels like a perverse type of hug.

Nicky suddenly feels the urge to lean just that little bit forward and rest his head on Yusuf’s shoulder.

He doesn’t. Instead he relives the memories of how he’s been killed by this person.

He has a million questions on the tip of his tongue, but stay’s silent.

“Ask your questions Nicolò, I know you want to,” Yusuf says as if reading his mind, continuing to clean the blood methodically, like he’s done this many times before.

“How old are you?

“The same as you. We met in the crusades.”

“Is that where you killed me?”

He feels Yusuf tense up around him, relaxing after a moment. “Yes.”

“How often did you kill me?”

“… Many times.”

“Why did you stop?”

“Because I was tired of it. As were you.”

“And we’ve been together since then?”

“Beyond a decade here for there, yes. For almost a nine hundred.”

“But I’ve killed you.”

There’s a pause.

“Not for many years,” he replies, and Nicky knows he’s considering all of his words carefully, remembering things long past, things that Nicky has no memories off.

“How long did it take us to go from enemies to… ?” he trails off, not sure what word to use.

Yusuf sighs, “a long time.”

He puts the towel down and takes Nicky’s head in his hands, carefully inspecting his work. They’re large and calloused. They could snap Nicky’s head very easily in this position. In fact, if Nicky’s dreams are to be believed he probably has.

Instead, they cradle his head like it’s something to be protected, and his thumb seems to absently stroke along Nicky’s jawline.

“All healed,” he says fondly, looking at Nicky with so much emotion that Nicky has no idea what to do with it.

Nicky looks away first.

“You’ll want to nap; head wounds always make you sleepy afterwards,” Yusuf says, leaving paracetamol by the side before standing and walking away and out the room like he hasn’t made Nicky’s axis spin 180 degrees.

But he’s right, within minutes of being left alone Nicky headache has come back in full force and he feels the pull of sleep. He swallows the pills and passes out quickly.

As he drifts off, he thinks he feels fingers carding through his hair.

For the first time in months, he doesn’t have a nightmare.

\---

When he wakes he’s still chained in the room, except this time his guard has changed. It’s Andy.

The sun is streaming through the window, and Nicky thinks it must be late morning. Andy is already swigging from a bottle of what smells like vodka. She asks him bluntly if he’s ‘got his shit under control’ and tells him that she’ll unchain him to piss and wash and because it’s making everyone else sad, but if he takes a swing at her, she’ll make him regret it.

He believes her entirely.

He comes out of the room, into a wider abandoned warehouse. The other two are loitering, unsure how to talk to a man they’ve known for years but who has no idea who they are. Yusuf is nowhere to be seen.

“Sorry for breaking your arm” he says to Nile for want of anything better to say. She shrugs, “you did worse when we went training in Alaska, so it’s fine. I’m just glad your back.” She steps forward to hug him, and Nicky takes a step back. She stops but her eyes flicker to Andy for a second. Whatever silent conversation they have, it makes Nile step back.

“Are you going to try and kill us again?” Booker asks.

Nicky shrugs, “not unless you give me a reason to”. Which seems a good enough answer for him.

“You really don’t remember anything?” Nile’s asks incredulously. Nicky shakes his head, he wants to know what happened to him.

Instead what comes out of his mouth is, “where’s Yusuf?

“Joe’s finding us a new safehouse. You moved on so quickly last time, we didn’t want to miss you again so we took the first space we could find when we found out you were here.” Andy says.

“Is that what we do? Travel aimlessly from country to country.” Nicky asks.

“We take jobs when we feel there’s some good to be done in the world. We fight for the causes we think are worth it.” Niles says strongly, interrupting whatever Andy was about to say. 

Nicky laughs; “not sure if you’ve seen it, but it’s not in a great state at the moment. The world isn’t getting any better, it’s getting worse.” His words make them all look sharply at him.

“You’ve always thought it was worth it,” Andy says quietly. He wonders how the past version of himself can be so idealistic after being alive so long. He changes the subject before it can become more awkward.

“If I’m staying with you, I need to go pick up my things.” He doesn’t really need to get anything from his old apartment, but he wants to get out, get away from this place and these people and their expectations for something that he won’t reach.

However, he isn’t going to run.

At least, he doesn’t think so.

“Booker can take you and then bring you back. He knows where to go.” Andy says with the finality of a woman long used to giving orders. Nicky wants to argue, but Booker already has the keys for a battered truck and is making his way out.

“So, you’re to make sure I don’t run away?” Nicky says unkindly as they’re driving into the town.

Booker smirks, “I haven’t been able to beat you in a fair fight for years. If you wanted to leave, you could. I’m just here to slow you down if you try and run away, give Andy and Joe a chance to play catch-up.”

“Not Nile?”

“She’s still a baby, her only defence would be you feeling bad about it. That, and if you do kill me, Joe probably won’t care”. Nicky thinks he could learn to like Bookers cynicism. It matches his own.

“Why would he not care if I kill you?”

Booker tells Nicky about how he’s supposed to be ‘exiled’ for his actions for 100 years, he explains Merrick, Copley and why he did it. Nicky thinks back to Tiarna and understands Bookers logic.

“It was less than what I expected, but more than what I’d hoped, but when you went missing Joe was so worried he called me. Couple that with being kidnapped by Quynh,” he shrugged, “it hasn’t stuck.”

“Who’s Quynh?” Nicky asks- when all he wants to do is ask about Yusuf.

The story Booker proceeds to tell sounds more fantastical as it continues. It’s the story of a women’s revenge, and ultimately, redemption. Like Booker, she’s being punished with abandonment from the rest of the team for the next three decades. Nicky thinks half millennia spent drowning should have been enough punishment. He says as much to Booker who barks out a short laugh.

“You wanted it to be longer.” He says.

“Why?” Nicky can’t think of a single reason why he would.

Booker gives him the side-eye, “she hurt Joe,” he says as if that explains it all.

It doesn’t- but Nicky doesn’t push it, worried what the answers will be. The travel the rest of the way in silence. When they arrive at the run-down apartment block Nicky goes to gather his few meagre possessions while Booker waits outside.

All of his life fits into a worn laundry bag. If he wanted to run, he could go out the back and be gone before Booker even knew it.

But where would go?

If they’re telling the truth, then they’re all the family he has left.

He goes back outside and climbs into the van. If he wants, he’ll run tomorrow he tells himself.

\---

They pull up to the safehouse outside the city. It’s rundown but the roof doesn’t look like it leaks and the views over the hills and into the sea are pretty spectacular.

He recognises that it also means it’s defensible if it comes under attack.

The house inside is old but clean, there’s a barely functioning kitchen with Nile scraping something into the bin and Andy is sitting at the table.

Yusuf isn’t there.

“Any chance you remember how to cook?” Nile asks as she scrapes the last of whatever was supposed to be food in the bin. Nicky raises an eyebrow in question and Booker pours them both a glass of foul rakia.

“You’re the cook amongst us,” Andy says as they join her at the table. “So for the last six months, we’ve been living off takeout and bad attempts at cooking.” Nicky laughs- he hasn’t cooked anything more adventurous then ramen noodles in moths. He says as much and everyone else finds it hilarious.

“So what else can you tell me about me then?” He asks good naturedly. They look at each other, and have that silent conversation that only people who have fought and died for each other can have. Nicky wonders if he used to have that with them.

“You think Shakespeare is overrated.”

“Your French accent is horrible.”

“Your favourite movie is Highlander, and you quote it at us and think it’s funny. It’s not.”

From there it descends into a game of them telling increasingly silly stories, and Nicky trying to work out if they’re telling him the truth. He’s pretty certain the story about breaking out of the Tower of London is false, but the escapades in India sound vaguely plausible.

“You are a good man, but you fight dirty and mean,” Yusef says, arriving quietly and putting a stack of pizza boxes on the table, “it is one of your many endearing qualities.” Nicky sticks a slice of pizza in his mouth so that he doesn’t have to respond.

It’s only as the meal ends that he remembers to ask the question that’s been bothering him.

“What happened to me?”

The table falls silent, and Yusuf’s gripping his glass like he wants to shatter it.

“We took what we thought was a smash and grab job for weapon smuggling into Ukraine,” Andy finally says, “except the warehouse was also a transit point for a smuggling people out of Ukraine” she pauses but no one else interrupts. “We were getting the people out when the local police showed up. They’d been bought off. Things went south fast; Joe and I were getting the people out while you and Nile covered us. You were still inside when the explosion happened. Some of the weapons in the warehouse were ordinance, all it took was a stray bullet….”

“You shoved me through the second story window, but you didn’t get out in time.” Nile finishes.

No one can look him in the eye.

Yusuf spoke the next part quietly, clearly painful for him in its retelling, “we searched for weeks afterwards…. But you didn’t show. We… we called Booker in, got Copley to call in every favour. We sent Nile to the rendezvous safe house in Sicily in case you went there.” Andy leans over and puts her hand on his in comfort. “But you just didn’t show. You didn’t contact us and we didn’t know where you were…. We thought you’d died Nicky.”

“But we’re immortal?...” He asks, confused.

“Everyone dies, we just don’t know when our time is.”

“You thought it was my time?” Nicky asks.

“We didn’t know what to think." Nicky gets an absurd impulse to hold him tight and console him.

“Copley called us three months later saying someone had been searching one of your alias’s online in Varna. We got there and found out that someone had checked into a hotel under that name, but by then you’d already bolted.” Nile says.

“We didn’t know if it was you, or someone else might be using it, or you’d gone to ground because you were being chased by something. You’re a hard bastard to track when you want to be” Andy finished.

Yusuf still won’t look at him, clearly lost in thought. 

Nicky empties the contents of his bag on the table, “this was all they found me with, do they mean anything to you?”

“You got this in Vietnam, it’s one of your favourite knives,” Booker says picking up the switch knife.

Andy picks up the key, “this probably opens one of the many lockbox’s you have. But I’d just throw it at this point, and the alias is burnt.”

Which left the hotel business card. Yusuf picks it up surprised, “I can’t believe this survived,”

“What does it mean?”

“…Nothing, it’s just a place you liked.” Yusuf murmurs. He makes no move to give the card back and leaves the table.

Nicky knows he’s not getting the whole truth.

The others clear the table and Andy grabs his arm as he stands to follow Yusuf; “take advice from an old lady, give it time. You have enough of it.”

He sits back down.

\---

Nicky heads upstairs and none of the others seems to have claimed any of the rooms, so he picks one at random and shoves the bed up against the wall so his back is protected, and falls asleep on edge.

He wakes with a start in the middle of the night, unbidden nightmares of slaughter and blood, killing Yusuf over and over again. Now that he can name him, the guilt of the murder sits heavy on his chest.

He knows he won’t fall asleep again easily, so heads downstairs.

Nicky steps outside and see’s Yusuf leaning against the wall, cigarette in hand and lost in thought. Nicky’s breath catches- he looks… he looks…. Nicky can’t find the words in any of his languages, to sum up what Yusuf looks like.

“Can I have one?” Nicky asks, and Yusuf looks caught off guard, and he wonders what he’s done wrong. Again.

“You hate them,” Yusuf says dazed, but hands one over. Emboldened, Nicky takes the one from Yusuf’s hands and uses it to light his before handing it back. The smoke burns and curls in his lungs.

Yusuf is staring at his mouth.

“You hate the taste of modern ones, and the smell it leaves behind,” he says confused, “You got annoyed with me every time I had one until I gave them up in the eighties.”

It feels obscene to be stared at like that. Nicky isn’t a brave enough man to admit he likes it.

“Maybe I’ve changed,” Nicky says, suddenly meaning more than just the cigarette.

The spell breaks and Yusuf looks away towards the sea; “maybe you have.”

The waves break against the cliffs in the distance.

“Tell me about us?” Nicky asks, emboldened by the darkness. Yusuf gives a bitter laugh.

“Even if I had a hundred years it still wouldn’t be enough to tell you all our stories.” He says, flicking his cigarette away.

He looks at Nicky, and Nicky has no idea what he’s thinking.

Yusuf darts forward plucks the cigarette out of Nicky’s mouth and takes the final puff before Nicky can move. He savours the cigarette like a starving man finally given food. He doesn’t move back and stay’s standing closer then he has any right to be.

Nicky feels his throat go dry.

“I dreamt of you,” Nicky says, no idea where this new-found honesty is coming from. “almost every night.”

Yusuf brings a hand up to cup Nicky’s head like it’s the most precious thing in the world.

“I dreamt of you as well.”

“I killed you, over and over again… we hurt each other so much in my dreams.”

“I did not dream the same things.” He replies.

Nicky takes a breath and finds the courage to ask the one question he wants to ask, but is scared of the answer he’ll get.

“What were we to each other?”

The smile slides slowly from Yusuf’s face, and it’s clear that these months have taken their toll.

“Everything… we are all that and more,” he says quietly, before brushing past and going inside.

Nicky stays outside until the sun comes out.

\---

One of the few positives of having fragmented memories of the last nine hundred years is that he gets to re-experience things. Nile shares music he likes, Booker reintroduces him to the joys of sporting matches, and Andy pulls out a bottle of something he doesn’t recognise but leaves the most amazing burn down the back of his throat. Andy smiles, “glad to see you still like it”.

They care for him. Nicky can see why he would like them. There is an easy familiarity and a gap that he can see some version of himself filling, expect that version of him is softer where time had made him kinder.

He’s still unsure of his place with Yusuf, who seems to be mourning the man Nicky once was. It’s also clear that the rest of the team don’t know how to deal with whatever is going on between the two of them. He’s not an idiot, he can see the stress it’s gives their little group dynamic. He overhears Nile’s telling Booker it reminds her of parents arguing, and Booker snorts and tells her it’s worse than that.

They don’t recognise the man he is now.

They tell him that he has the time, that over months the memories might come back. But truthfully, no one knows.

With Yusuf, it feels like an uneasy truce, or a calm before the storm. Nicky is hyper-aware of his presence all the time, in a way that he isn’t with the others. Cataloguing every aborted reach Yusuf makes in the quiet moments, the way he’s always friendly with a smart word waiting, but always so carefully maintains his distance.

Yusuf is so *careful* around Nicky, and it’s driving him insane.

One week in, Nile boots up the computer and says they have a job from Copley in Nigeria. She doesn’t get to say anything more before Yusef is saying no.

Nicky knows he’s saying no because of him. Because Yusuf thinks he is broken. Weak.

“Why not?” Nicky asks, goading Yusuf. “I don’t remember Nigeria, it might be good to go somewhere new.” He doesn’t take his eyes off Yusuf as he says, “Nile, I’m interested in what this Copley has to say.”

Yusuf looks furious and Nile looks caught between a rock and a hard place. Even Andy stays silent.

“Nicolò. Don’t.” he says harshly in Arabic.

“Give me a reason,” Nicky replies back in an Italian language long dead. Nicky knows he can be vicious and cruel. Knows that he rarely shows this side of himself so openly because it surprises everyone but Yusuf. But Yusuf doesn’t trust him, doesn’t see his as his equal, and that hurts in a way that’s hard to measure and cuts him deep. 

So, he lashes out.

Yusuf storms out of the room, coming back a moment later with a sword and shoves it into Nicky’s chest, with his scimitar in his other hand.

Nicky blanches at the sword he’s now holding. He knows this weapon, he’s fought and killed with it.

He’s killed Yusuf with it.

“You beat me in a fight then we listen,” he says angrily, and Nicky’s resentment simmers just below his skin.

As if Yusuf gets to control him. To decide when he’s worthy. When he’s equal. 

“Guys…” Nile says wary

“Don’t. This is between them.” Andy says. “Go get whatever this is out your system,” she says head jerking to the back door.

Nicky follows Yusuf out, as he’s stalking towards a covered clearing. None of the others follows. When they reach the small clearing Yusuf states the rules; try not to kill each other- but everything else is fair game. Then he lunges.

Nicky barely has time to parry the move and feels the force of it reverberate up to his shoulder before Yusuf aims low and tries to disembowel him.

Nicky blocks it and brings his elbow up and into Yusuf’s nose. He lands a direct hit and Yusuf’s head snaps back, blood spraying. It’s a dirty move but it works, and sometimes that’s all you need.

The fight is brutal but exhilarating, with Nicky relying on body memories he didn’t know he had. He stops the overhead cut but has a knee kicked out from underneath him. It explodes in pain but is already healing as he gets a solid punch in the ribs.

Yusuf is a brilliant fighter, controlled and vicious. He leans into the fight, face caught between a snarl and a grin. He isn’t being careful anymore, he isn’t holding back. He’s treating Nicky as his equal.

Yusuf does the complicated thing with his feet that Nicky’s dreamt of before, so he moves to his left before the sword goes right.

Turns out he dreamt it wrong and the sword stabs through his left side. Yusuf’s eyes widen in surprise, clearly not expecting to have hit him. He pulls his weapon away, and Nicky takes advantage of the split second to bring his sword in an upward swing catching Yusuf across the chest.

The pair fall to the floor and bleed out rapidly. The last thing Nicky sees as he dies is Yusuf.

They both wake up within moments of each other, and without thinking Nicky rolls over, straddling Yusuf. Sword forgotten, he goes to punch Yusuf in the face, but Yusuf catches the fist and flips them. With Nicky know face down in the dirt, arm painfully pinned behind him.

Nicky knows he’s lost as soon as he feels the dirt touch his face- but he struggles anyway because that’s just who he is. 

“Stop Nicolo, please I beg you. I will not do this anymore.” Yusuf says panting with exertion from their brawl. “I will not fight you.”

Nicky is suddenly furious. Angry at the entire fucked up situation. “WHY NOT?!” He half half-shouts into the dirt.

“You know why... I will not watch you die again, even if it’s by hand.” He lets go and Nicky throws him off and turns to face him.

“That’s not good enough, tell me the truth” Nicky snarls.

Yusuf remains sitting on the ground where Nicky’s thrown him and it comes pouring angrily out, “In all our year’s we have only been apart for a handful of times. You have never gone somewhere that I could not follow. It has always been Niccolò and Yusuf, Nicholas and Joseph, Nicky and Joe. It’s always been Us and everyone else”

“But when we couldn’t find you after the explosion, you went somewhere I could not follow… and until the next one of us was made I wouldn’t know if you were truly dead or trapped somewhere unable to escape and dying over and over again.”

He puts with his heads in his hands almost sobbing, “Those were my two choices Nicky, the idea of you being tortured and drowned for centuries, or the idea of you being truly gone. I didn’t know which I hated more.”

“Don’t make me go through that again so soon. You are many things, but you have never been cruel.” He sounds so broken as he says it.

It’s the most words he’s heard Yusuf say since they found him. And it’s like someone pours water on Nicky’s burning righteous anger, because how can you be angry in the face of such raw grief?

Nicky’s heart breaks and he pulls Yusuf towards him, until his head is resting on Nicky’s shoulder and he’s holding Nicky so tightly, it’s as if he expects Nicky to disappear.

“Sono qui.” Nicky says repeatedly in Italian to reassure Yusuf.

“Please Nicolo, I can’t….” He murmurs in soft Arabic in the space between Nicky’s shoulder and neck.

Nicky’s not sure what this feeling is inside of him, but he knows he doesn’t want to hurt this Man in his arms.

Not anymore.

For now, that is enough.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for all the comments and previous Kudos, they were much appreciated. Apologies for not getting back to the very kind people that offered to Beta. RL got in the way, but I'm trying to get a chapter out a week so wanted to post todat. I will get around to it this week 
> 
> Feel free to let me know what your favourite parts are.
> 
> I wanted this chapter mostly to just focuses on getting Nicky from the murdering mindset to someone who might be able to love Nicky- so lots of H/C- hopefully not too much though.
> 
> This was by far the hardest chapter to write... It also just kept growing.


	3. 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> New chapter- sorry it’s taken so long, I got distracted and wrote the sequel which is from Yusef’s perspective… so yeh that’s a thing that’s coming…
> 
> I pinky promise last chapter will not take this long to write. 
> 
> Two things to note- I've changed Yusef to Yusuf, also I've retroactively changed the timeline from the first chapter. Previously it only took 1 month from the explosion to being found on the beach. I've changed it to three months before he washed up on the beach. Doesn't affect this chapter but makes the sequel(ish...) much more fun to write. 
> 
> Also- this is legit the longest chapter I've written by far.... plot bunnies ate my brain. 
> 
> As always thank you for the Kudos

They go back to the house in silence, and Andy takes one look at them before saying Booker, Nile and she will take the job in Nigeria.

It’s obvious Nicky and Yusuf won’t be joining them.

Nicky heads upstairs past their collective worried looks and straight to his room, and can feel Yusuf’s stare on his back as if it were a physical weight. Stripping off, he doesn’t even bother to wipe off the blood before face-planting on the bed.

Emotional outbursts are draining.

A short time later he feels the pull of hunger, heads downstairs and hears a soft conversation happening in the kitchen between Andy and Yusuf. It’s not loud enough to hear what they’re saying, but the tone and emotion are clear- consolation and grief. He turns straight around and goes back upstairs, hunger being more palatable than having to deal with whatever is happening downstairs. The evening stretches, and he sees a shadow loitering just underneath his door, interrupting the slither of light from underneath the floor. 

In a way that he can’t explain, he knows it's Yusuf.

He keeps the door shut, and the shadow disappears further down the hallway after a few minutes. Clearly, he’s not the only one that’s done with the emotional rigmarole.

The next day when he finally makes his way downstairs, the other three are all packed. Yusuf is standing nearby and looks like he either wants to stab something or run away.

The other two trail out silently, but Andy hugs him close as she moves past.

“I don’t know if I can fix this,” he finds himself whispering into her ear.

“Have a little faith.” She tells him back. The silence once they leave becomes deafening.

“Where does that leave us?” Nicky asks Yusuf. Yusuf sighs and it’s clear he’s frustrated and doesn’t know what to do with it. He angrily picks up one of the knives on the table and throws it at the map of Europe that Nile had haphazardly pinned to the wall a couple of days ago.

It’s the map they’d been using to track Nicky when they couldn’t find him.

The knife emends itself on Greece.

“Athens?” Yusuf says.

Nicky shrugs, good a place as any to start.

**Athens**

The trip from Durres to Athens is unremarkable, and between the crowded train compartments and the mundane necessities of travel, it limits the awkwardness that yawns between them.

From the station, Yusuf moves and navigates the city like a local, leading them through increasingly narrow streets downtown. Eventually, they arrive outside one innocuous door having walked past a hundred buildings that look just like it.

They go up three flights of graffitied stairs and Yusuf slams his fist against a door. A man in his late sixty’s answers, clearly unsurprised to see Yusuf standing in front of him. He hands over a key, barks something to them in rapid-fire Greek and Yusuf goes into the flat at the top of the building.

“We’re renting the flat?”

Yusuf pauses and looks at him strangely, “We own the building….”

“What do we tell them?” Nicky asks as they enter. Surely someone in the building must notice that the men who own it aren’t ageing. Yusuf shrugs, “we alternate ownership through different companies and keep the rent cheap so they don’t ask questions.”

Yusuf walks around the flat with a familiarity that Nicky is jealous of. Nicky walks around to see if it sparks any memories in him.

It doesn’t.

He does, however, notice that the place only has one bedroom. He’s already thinking of ways to delicately raise it when Yusuf’s voice drifts behind him, “I’ll take the sofa.”

Nicky opens his voice to politely argue but decides not to look the gift horse in the mouth too closely. They dump their bags and Yusuf declares that he knows exactly where to take Nicky for dinner.

He leads Nicky on a byzantine route through the city that Nicky doesn’t have a hope of ever remembering. As he leads him through the city he speaks to Nicky in Greek. It was their first common language, he says, and it holds a special place in Yusuf’s heart.

It is probably a special place for Nicky as well. He just wishes he could remember it, and his failure sits bitterly in his chest. They eventually alight on a small taverna that is spilling out onto the street and packed full of locals. Nicky takes one of the last tables as Yusuf chats in animated Greek to the staff and brings back lamb Kafka’s and beer.

Nicky tries to practice his Greek on Yusuf over dinner, who laughs and easily corrects him. The conversation doesn’t flow per-say but it works.

As the evening draws on Yusuf looks around and moves closer to Nicky.

Not uncomfortably close, but just enough for it to be noticeable. And it is noticed. This time by an angry young man with his friends. 

The man hurls some low brow insult at them, and Yusuf doesn’t miss a beat and spits one back. Nicky only got half of what was being said, but regardless of language, all insults sound the same.

The man’s face purples to whatever Yusuf says and Yusuf follows through with a barbed comment that has the man attempting to punch Yusuf.

The keyword is _attempting_.

Nicky catches the thug’s wrist without thinking easily and viciously twists it. If it isn’t snapped, it’s certainly damaged. The man howls in pain, which gets his friend’s attention and who all rush forward like idiots.

After that, the bar descends into an all-out brawl. Nicky keeps a vague eye on Yusuf whose hold his own magnificently, slamming the head of some skinhead hard into the side of a table, grinning so hard it looks like it could split his face.

It’s the two of them against the bar, and the odds have never been in their favour more.

It’s glorious carnage, and Nicky is fighting the urge to laugh. He hadn’t known he needed to fight as much until now.

He realises that fighting _beside_ Yusuf is far more fun than fighting _against_ Yusuf.

Fifteen minutes later, both of them are standing among the fallen and groaning bodies around them. Nicky feels more alive than he has in months, the stress that’s been building inside him gone for the moment. He looks over at Yusuf who’s managed to somehow acquire a split lip that’s already healed, and he’s wiping away the blood with his hand.

For an impossible moment, Nicky wants to lick it. But the moment passes and he does nothing.

They leave out the back like truant schoolchildren and Yusuf has his arm thrown over Nicky, adrenalin thrumming through both of them and making them more languid and stepping closer to each other than before.

“Do you feel better?” Yusuf asks.

Nicky looks at him, as realisation dawns on him, “you did that on purpose!?”

“There are idiots like them throughout history, and when you’re in one of these moods you either want to fuck or fight... so fight it is…” Yusuf shrugs, caught up in the moment.

“Who do I normally fuck?” Nicky asks back easily, also caught up in the moment. His mind then catches up with his mouth and Yusuf's breath catches.

They’ve never addressed this elephant in the room in the few weeks they’ve known each other. Nicky thinks that he’s always subconsciously suspected. Still, it’s one thing to suspect- it’s another to thrust the question centre stage.

Nicky looks at Yusuf, and he looks warier than Nicky has ever seen him in a fight.

“We were lovers,” Nicky says stopping in the middle of the street. It’s a statement, not a question. As he says it, he feels the certainty of the statement and knows that it's true.

Yusuf nods his head, mute.

Nicky’s brain skips like a broken record as he tries to process it, “when we stopped killing each other, did we become lovers afterwards?”

“No… but only because we are both very stubborn men and we were both very stupid at the time.”

Nicky belatedly recognises that they’re talking about it in the past tense.

Yusuf takes a step forward. Nicky takes a step back, turns and walks in the other direction. Elation from the fight gone in the face of… this.

Yusuf doesn’t follow him, and within moments Nicky realises he’s lost in a foreign city with no idea how to get back to his bed. He takes a couple of random turns, hoping one will spark his memory and none do. He comes to a square and finds himself unceremoniously sitting down in the eaves of a small shop as he desperately tries to gather himself.

He wonders what it would be like to feel such devotion to one person for that long, to have something so consistent by your side while everything else changes. To know that you’re not alone.

Ten minutes into his existential crisis he feels someone sit down beside him.

“How did you find me?” Nicky asks dully.

“Same way I always have,” is the only answer Yusuf gives. Cryptic bastard.

Yusuf looks at him with a horrible fondness. “I know you won’t believe me, but for centuries you’ve always been the more controlled and disciplined of the two of us.” Yusuf finally says, “you’ve always known what to say at the right moment, and you have always been the kinder of the two of us. I didn’t say anything, not because I am ashamed of us, but because I thought of what you would do.”

Nicky has no idea what to say in the face of such adoration. He just feels like a fraud.

“Over the years, other people have mistaken this kindness for weakness, that your ability to forgive is a sign of softness.” Yusuf continues.

“What do you think?” Nicky asks.

Yusuf snorts and jokes darkly, “I think let them fight and be killed by you for over a decade and still have the balls to call you weak.” Nicky smiles. “I hadn’t realised before, but time has mellowed both of us. We killed each other over such petty things at the beginning…. You once stabbed me in the eye after I came back drunk and snored.”

That does make Nicky laugh. It sounds exactly like something he would do.

“I see so much of the man I met in the crusades in you again, and I care for all the parts of you, even the mean and ugly parts.”

Nicky feels like he should apologise, but he doesn’t know what to apologise for. For not remembering? For taking away the man Yusuf knew and loved, and leaving a shadow behind? How can a simple apology make up for that?

“I'm not the man you once knew… I can’t… I don’t….” Nicky stumbles over the sentence and berates himself, jealous of Yusuf’s ability to speak his mind so clearly. He can’t say offer the same devotion- not yet, and maybe not ever. Nicky is too honest to make a promise that isn’t there. He respects Yusuf too much for that.

“I know,” Yusuf says, hearing everything that Nicky can’t say, and takes his hand. “I have never wanted you to feel or say something you do not.”

“What if I never remember?” Nicky asks, his worst fear made clear.

Yusuf places a chaste and reverent kiss on his hand, “then we make new memories. We have time.”

**Nairobi**

After the admission in Athens, things are easier. Not perfect, but easier. 

They make their way slowly down through Africa via Egypt, travelling overland with seemingly no clear destination. By the time they hit Kenya, the monsoon season starts with a vengeance and they hole up in a small house with a wide veranda surrounding it, content to try and wait it out.

Well, Yusuf seems content to wait it out patiently, while Nicky tries not to feel claustrophobic inside the too-small house. He can feel the restlessness building uncomfortably in him and feels himself turning the anger back on himself. Yusuf notices it too, asking after him and trying to coax the words out of him, but it doesn’t work.

A week into their confinement, Nicky asks Yusuf to spar with him in an attempt to distract himself. Yusuf’s bites out a no and storms back inside so quickly that Nicky is left all but standing like an idiot on their porch. The rest of the evening is tense in a way it's never been before, and it takes Nicky an embarrassingly long time to realise that Yusuf is genuinely angry and hurt. Yusuf doesn’t seem like a man prone to hiding his feelings, but now he goes quiet and takes it out on the kitchenware as he cooks.

Nicky’s seen him annoyed and frustrated, but never upset like he is now and he’s too much for a coward to ask why. It’s only as he sits outside and listens to the incessant rain that he realises the last time they sparred, Yusuf killed him by accident.

Nicky feels like a dick. Tomorrow he’ll apologise. 

That night he dreams, and between the guilt and the rain, he dreams of water and drowning. 

Nicky thinks he can’t breathe. He can’t get the air into his lungs. He’s going to die.

Again.

And again.

And again. 

He desperately tries to pull air into his lungs, distantly hearing himself gasping as the terror wakes him up and he falls out of the bed. He hears thundering footsteps along the hallway before the door swings open so hard it bangs off the wall and Yusuf is suddenly in front of him as dark spots cloud his vision. 

Yusuf moves him until his back is pressed against Yusuf’s chest, his arms wrapped around Nicky- who _still_ can’t breathe. He holds him close and commands Nicky in low and panicked words to breathe in a mixture of every language they know. Nicky can feel him breathing deeply against his back and desperately tries to sync his breath to Yusuf's simple and constant rhythm, all the while pathetically clinging to him like a newborn.

Yusuf seems distraught that he can’t do anything, can’t protect Nicky from this part of himself. He pushes his head into the crown of Nicky’s hair and places feather-light kisses on it, desperate to provide any sort of comfort.

It takes Nicky a worryingly long time to feel like he has any control over himself, embarrassed that he’s reduced to such a miserable state. 

“I am sorry” Nicky mutters, unsure whether he’s apologising for his behaviour earlier, the dream and his response or the mixture of both. Yusuf says nothing and just pulls him close until they’re pressed flush chest to back. 

They stay like that until morning and leave for the next place in the morning. 

**Zanzibar**

They leave Nairobi quickly, running from something Nicky can’t, and won’t, talk about. Yusuf’s concerned but he doesn’t push, and Nicky can see that Yusuf worries about him, in the quiet constant way that those who love other people always do.

They sleep in separate beds but there are more casual touches from Yusuf, some to the lower back to steer him, or the arm to get his attention. Nicky finds himself gradually leaning into them.

He never initiates any of them himself.

Yusuf tells them of their past in fits and starts and Nicky absorbs it all like a sponge. He takes Nicky to places they’ve gone before, and they try to see if anything sparks his memory. They go to Zanzibar and rent a small place in Stone Town.

According to Yusuf, Nicky loves Stone Town. It was where he learnt to love cooking, learning all about the spices that sailed through the port. Moreover, because it was a trading and port town, it was one of the few places men like them could be friends and not seem out of place.

But mostly, according to Yusuf, Nicky liked to sink slave ships in the bay and help smuggle those captured back to the mainland before they could be sold on.

None of which matters when Andy calls them up and says the job in Nigeria is over and they're nearby. The implicit invitation for them to reunite hangs in the air, and Nicky says yes before Yusuf can say no.

He wants to find out more for himself, can’t believe the version of himself that Yusuf speaks of. There is no way for one person to be that good.

The others join after a couple of days, and as Andy hugs Yusuf, Nicky sees the shadow’s that have been hanging over him lift slightly. They’re not staying with Nicky an Yusuf, but in a small house just outside the city nestled among the plantations. Yusuf dryly notes that it even has running water- a luxury by Andy’s standards.

As Nile regales them with tales of the Niger Delta, Nicky finds himself enjoying the evening, only now realising how much he’s missed their company. Towards the end, Andy declares that she’s long overdue reacquainting herself with the spice farms on the far side of the island, and asks Nicky to join her. He sees it for what it is, a check-up, but the enjoyable company of the evening has mellowed him so he agrees good-naturedly.

The next day she gets him up early and they take the motorbikes. Andy speaks to the locals in a mixture of Swahili and pigeon English, while Nicky charms them in Arabic. It’s clear that they’ve done this before and there is an easy companionship between them.

Nicky enjoys it more than he thought it would.

They travel further to the coast on the recommendation of a local who tells them to ask for Mosi for the best meal on the island. As they settle down, Nicky feels relaxed and at peace.

Which is exactly when Andy starts to interrogate him. Sly- but effective.

“I remember the first time I dreamt of you and Joe. I remember watching you kill each other over and over again. You both seemed so angry and confused. The man I saw in Durres reminded me of him.”

“Yusuf says the same thing.”

“And now?” she asks casually.

He looks at her questioningly, hoping to wait out the silence, but she’s older than all of them combined and he knows he won’t win.

“I feel…” he searches for the word, “more grounded,” he says carefully. She nods, accepting the answer.

“Our family is all we have as everything else changes. It took us decades before we met each other and, in the dreams, I saw how you changed each other. Soon it’ll just be you four. They’ll need you- Joe will need you.”

Nicky has no idea what she’s asking for, so she tries a different tact.

“Has he told you about Quynh?” She asks looking out over the ocean, and the conversation topic change takes him by surprise. “You love her, she’s loyal, smart, funny and a pit viper in a fight. When we lost here they were the worst months of my life but throughout it all, you and Joe kept me sane, you stopped me from trying to join her.”

“When you disappeared after the explosion, and we couldn’t find you... I felt a fear I haven’t felt since we lost her. Then we got her back and lost you. I thought it was some fucked up trade and we spent every moment searching for you. We hired divers and got Copley to get boats to dredge the harbour. Joe called Booker himself to get him to help, and for three months there was nothing," she sighs, "they were the worst months since we lost Quynh.”

“Do you understand what I’m saying, Nicky?” Andy asks.

Nicky suddenly does.

“We all thought you died a true death and it broke us as a family, but it destroyed Joe. We had to pick ourselves up together again thinking you were gone. I watched Joe go half-insane with grief. I had to console a man who felt he was truly alone for the first time in a millennium.”

Nicky gets it- she’s dying and their family needs him. He knows that Booker and Yusuf’s relationship is still fragile and may be for decades, Quynh needs more time to heal. Nile is brilliant, will one day be better than the rest of them, but right now she is so desperately young.

Nicky has been so focused on his pain, he hasn’t seen anyone else’s.

He is broken, but so are the rest of them.

“I am sorry,” he says, which seems to be repeated like a daily prayer. She pulls him close and he wonders how many times they’ve embraced like this.

“Families don’t need to apologise to each other.” She tells him as she holds him. They finish up and ride back. He leaves her at their safe house with the promise of future trips and goes back to his flat to find Yusuf reading on the couch.

He doesn’t second guess himself, but goes straight up to Yusuf and all but drapes himself on him as he pulls him into an embrace. 

Yusuf freezes in the embrace, clearly torn between returning the gesture, but also terrified that it will spook Nicky. It’s the first time that Nicky has reached out first. After a moment he returns the gesture and Nicky can feel the tension leaving him as they hold each other.

It feels right.

“Good chat with Andy?” Yusuf asks lightly.

“She is sneaky,” Nicky mumbles in Italian into Yusuf’s chest. He can feel Yusuf’s grin.

“She’s like that,” he says, “pretending she doesn’t care, but we all know differently.”

Nicky sits back and takes Yusuf’s hands. He needs Yusuf to understand, he needs to apologise, but whatever he’s about to say is clear on his face as Yusuf just pulls him back against him.

“You priests and your guilt,” Yusuf jokes softly, forgiveness clear in his voice.

**Suez**

The team say their goodbyes a few days later- with Andy taking Nike to Mongolia so she can learn how to ride a horse properly and Booker says he’s going back to Paris. Taking himself back into what seems more like self-imposed exile than banishment.

Nicky and Yusuf stay for a while before getting a container ship up north, the pull of the Mediterranean and the land surrounding it, ever calling them home. They sail through the Bab-el-Mandeb and towards the Suez Canal, and Nicky finds out to his horror that one of the many downsides of amnesia is that his body no longer remembers how to fight seasickness. A skill that took many years to acquire according to Yusuf, and is a source of unending irony given Nicky was born in a port town.

Yusuf, of course, seems to handle the sea fine. Bastard.

They keep mostly to themselves, left alone by the crew. They’re given a single room with 2 bunks. For the first couple of days, Nicky tries to struggle through seasickness alone. However, after a week he finds his head in Yusuf’s lap, whose fingers card through his hair and reads aloud whatever book he can find, or just tells him stories of their many adventures.

He’s a big enough of a man to admit it helps.

A couple of weeks in, the ship holds up the Suez waiting for permission to go north up the canal. Nicky is standing on the deck and looking out at the port city. He thinks It looks so different since they were last here during the early 1950s, before the Six-day war a decade later.

Nicky doesn’t realise the importance of this single thought until the evening, with his head in Yusuf’s lap when he realises…

…He’s starting to remember.

He sits up so fast he almost headbutts Yusuf who looks concerned until Nicky tells him. For the first time in a long time, he smiles at Nicky and there’s no sadness in it at all. 

**Beirut**

They disembark in Beirut, and Nicky falls in love with the city immediately.

It’s a city that by all rights shouldn’t work but somehow through sheer force of will does. Its people are loud, brash, caring and funny, and the energy of the city is contagious.

It reminds him of Yusuf.

Through a series of convoluted events that will one day make a great drinking story, they end up in a flat to call home for as long as they need. They wonder how they could have ended up somewhere so nice before they both realise that it lacks any sort of air-conditioning apart from a lazy fan. Accepting their fate, they escape the flat's oppressive heat by exploring the neighbourhood.

They get lost in the city and enjoy the clash of old and new. Yusuf has an impassioned debate with a local shopkeeper about Lebanese Vs Turkish wine, and Nicky finds himself picking up the local language quirks quickly. He laughs so hard at a joke their new friend makes he almost cries.

It’s the most fun he’s had in months.

By evening the city still feels like a furnace and they escape to an air conditioned bar with low lighting and an expansive wine list. Yusuf jokes that they should try one of each, clearly enjoying himself.

Nicky takes his leave and goes by himself to explore a nearby souk, picking up a small notebook for Yusuf as his old one is almost full of random drawings. When he comes back, he finds two women talking sitting at their table and chatting amicably with Yusuf.

Yusuf glances at him as he returns and in that one moment Nicky knows he’s being asked something, but he’s not sure what it is. The two women introduce themselves as Sara and Manal, students at the local university and they’re smart, funny and good company.

Manal sits beside Yusuf and talks of her medical studies; which Yusuf seems to find genuinely interesting, while Sara talks about the different things Nicky should see while in the city. The conversation continues easily as the evening continues and both ladies’ marvel at how good Nicky’s Arabic is, complimenting Yusuf on his teaching skills.

With such good company, Nicky wonders why he’s feeling uncomfortable, but something sits just beneath his ribs and won’t dislodge. It isn’t until Manal is ordering another glass, and innocently touches Yusuf’s arm to see if he wants another that it suddenly hits him.

Jealousy. What he is feeling is jealousy.

With the knowledge of the emotion, he feels shame, because what right does he have to be jealous? He is the one that has put self-inflicted walls between Yusuf and himself. He is being so incredibly selfish- he doesn’t think he wants Yusuf, but he doesn’t want anyone else to have him. How can he be this petty? Nicky was the priest- not Yusuf. If Yusuf wants company then he should be able to have it. Nickys his own time in Europe eats at him. 

The girls ask to join them for dinner and Yusuf glances up. Nicky says yes for no other reason than he’s clearly a masochist.

They’re taken to a small restaurant nearby, and Nicky unkindly thinks Manals being about as subtle as Andy in a fight, but Yusuf seems to take it all with good humour. As the evening turns to night, the girls invite them dancing and Nicky looks at Yusuf, wanting to say no but with yes on his tongue if that’s what Yusuf wants.

Yusuf replies before he can open their mouths and says that they are tired (a complete lie), so begs mercy and happily takes their number scrawled on the back of a receipt. Sara hugs Nicky as they leave and invites him to some event, but he isn’t paying attention as he looks at Yusuf who laughs loudly at something Manal says. They part on good terms with promise to meet again soon.

They return to the flat and it’s still too hot. Nicky heads to the shower but it makes no difference. When he comes out stripped to just his boxers he finds Yusuf similarly clothed and lying on the floor. It feels more practical than sensual.

“I am too drunk for it to be this hot,” Yusuf complains good-naturedly, before declaring the tiles are cool and he’s sleeping there for the evening and Nicky should join him. Nicky laughs and does, there’s barely room for them both on a floor and his arm is plastered up against Yusuf.

Today has been a good day but the women from the evening and the feelings they brought with them eats at him.

“I can’t sleep if you’re thinking that loud,” Yusuf says, moving to recline on his elbow, head propped on his hand looking at Nicky. The ceiling fan above them whirls pathetically, and Nicky feels the sweat slowly bead down between his shoulder blades. 

“I was jealous earlier at the bar, and then I got angry at myself,” Nicky says quietly without looking at Yusuf because it’s easier to speak without seeing the expression on his face. Yusuf doesn’t make a sound, and Nicky continues. “I have no right to be jealous.”

Yusuf places two fingers under his chin and gently guides it so Nicky has no choice but to look right at him. “You have a right to feel whatever you want,” Yusuf says contrarily. Defending Nicky even if it’s only against himself.

Nicky thinks of this man before him and hates his own selfishness. “You could have gone back with Manal. She wanted you too”. Yusuf looks down at him, clearly confused. “I don’t… you shouldn’t feel beholden. If you want to take someone to bed, you should.” He doesn’t say he wouldn’t mind, because he thinks he would. But he would also understand.

He needs Yusuf to know that he’s free.

“Manal was kind, but she is a child,” Yusuf says. Nicky hears the implicit rejection, and Yusuf’s devotion burns him. Especially when Nicky hasn’t shown it back. “Did you want Sara?” Yusuf asks, Nicky shakes his head. 

“What if I had?” He asks.

Yusuf lays his hand carefully on Nicky’s chest, and it feels like a brand like he’s being claimed. His palms aren’t soft, they’re calloused and rough from a thousand fights. 

“Then we would have brought them both back here and enjoyed our evening.”

Nicky knows Yusuf can feel his heart rabbiting away, but he makes no attempt to move it. “I am not as good as you. In Europe, I fucked other people,” he says, blunt and uncompromising. Nicky’s not sure what he expects from Yusuf; anger, shock or disappointment. He gets none of those, just the small smile that he knows only he gets to see. 

“We have been in each other’s lives for nearly a thousand years, give or take a century, we’ve both fucked other people Nicky.” He goes silent, considering his next words carefully, “quite frankly, there isn’t a lot we haven’t done with other people or to each other. So, you have nothing to be ashamed of and there is nothing to forgive.”

“I think they reminded me of you in some way, I just didn’t know it,” Nicky confesses quietly. Yusuf says nothing but takes it as the apology it’s meant to be. Yusufs hand moves down and his eyes follow them, brushing past Nicky’s nipples to rest on his sternum, hand spread out with his little finger catching slightly on the light trail hair that goes down from Nicky’s belly button. 

Nicky tries hard to control his breathing. 

“A long time ago you found a whore that looked like my wife and brought her back for me as a surprise, for no other reason than you knew I’d like it. You spent so much money on her. I was furious but you said it was money well spent. The three of us spent a week together that I have never forgotten, before we helped her out of the city. We used to joke that it was your one-hundredth anniversary present to me.” Yusuf smiles, remembering good memories.

Nicky feels almost jealous for this ghost of himself that he’ll never know. Who got to grow with Yusuf, share all this history together. Who knows all these things about Yusuf that Nicky doesn’t.

How fucking absurd to be jealous of yourself and some random woman dead for centuries?

“What was your wife’s name?”

“Fatima.” He says easily, hiding nothing from Nicky, “We were married young and had no children before I went to fight against you heathen Christians. I told you about her when we stopped fighting, and you told me to go back to her and my family. It was the first time we’d fought since we’d stopped killing each other. You thought it would make me happy.”

“Did you go back? Did it make you happy?”

Yusef laughed, “No, I refused to go because I was stubborn. So you killed me, tied me to my horse and took me back to the edge of my hometown. She’d remarried by then, and it was good to see her and my family, even if from afar. It gave me a closure I didn’t know I needed," his little finger brushes back and forth in small movements, catching the hairs slightly, "just one of the many kindnesses you’ve given me over the years.” Nicky can feel the goosebumps on his skin rising, “but then when I came back I found you’d left me.”

“I did?”

“Hmm,” his eyes haven't moved from where his hand is splayed out on Nicky. “It took me months to find you afterwards. I was so angry and ready to kill you when I next saw you, but then you told me that my happiness was more important than your loneliness. That you thought it was what I wanted,” he pauses, “you always have a way with words when you want to.”

Nicky’s eyes trace the sweat that’s gathered on Yusuf’s collarbone.

“Did you love her?”

Yusuf shrugged, his fingers now making random patterns.

“I thought I did,” he said honestly, “but I think now that it was just fidelity.”

Yusuf’s fingers on his stomach make him bold, “when did you know what love felt like?”

The fingers still. He looks at Nicky and his eyes dart up, and then down, to Nicky’s mouth. It feels like they’re standing on a precipice.

“Alexandria,” he says with a certainty that surprises Nicky. “You were sitting on a small quay waiting for me, and I watched you give the last of your food to a stray kitten. You were talking to it and I knew then.”

Nicky places his hand on top of Yusuf’s. It should feel uncomfortable and hot but it doesn’t. It feels right. Yusuf’s breath catches as he does it. “And when did I know?” Nicky asks.

“…Antalya…” he’s looking at their joined hands, “you asked me to shave your beard and trusted me with a blade to your throat,” he turns his hands and interlaces their fingers. Nicky doesn’t stop him. “You told me that when you leaned back and bared your throat... that was when you knew.” He smiles like he’s telling a cherished and coveted secret. Nicky grins back- of course he’d fall in love with the man when he’s got a blade to his throat.

The air suddenly feels too thick for talking.

Bold in a way Nicky hasn’t been before, he pulls Yusuf forward until his head is resting on Nicky's chest and they lie against each other in the stifling heat, pressed shoulder to leg. He brings an arm under Yusuf and doesn’t let go of Yusuf’s other hand. He can feel Yusuf’s beard scratching on his chest, and his hair tickles Nicky’s chin. He knows their bodies will get sticky and hot, they’ll sweat on each other and tomorrow need to shower. 

But for now, he doesn’t care.

Yusuf turns his head into Nicky’s chest and breathes deeply, tension leaving his body. Against Nicky’s chest, he feels like a man who’s come home.

They sleep like that all night long.

**Malta**

Nicky might joke with Yusuf that he doesn’t believe in destiny any more- but it seems to still believe in him- because it all comes to a head in Malta.

Because of cause it fucking does.

According to Yusuf, Malta is their place. Nicky thinks it might be the closest thing they have to a home. It’s frustrating that he doesn’t remember it.

From Beirut they end up in Turkey, finding excuses to sleep closer together most nights, and Nicky can feel something building inside him. Yusuf remains endlessly patient with him, more patient than Nicky deserves and never pushes for anything that isn’t already offered. So it surprises him when Yusuf, clearly nervous, asks him if he wants to go to Malta next, 

Nicky can’t think of a reason to say no, so he says yes and Yusuf’s face lights up. Nicky suddenly thinks it’s a reason enough to say yes.

When they finally make it to Malta and Nicky sets eyes on the house he immediately regrets agreeing. The house is almost entirely dilapidated. They steal water from a local farm when they hook up a pipe, chop wood for cooking and jerry-rig a wi-fi system from something Copley sent them. They tell the locals that Nicky is the grandson of Nicolò di Genova and that they’re staying for the summer to do the property up and sell it.

They’ll just buy it through a shell company. This time Yusuf will own it.

The building is rotten in parts, and they haggle with the local tradesmen who try to rip them off, just as they did with their grandparents Yusuf happily tells him. Throughout it, Yusuf is happy in a way that Nicky hasn’t seen before.

Or at least can remember.

Under the evening sky, Yusuf half draped over Nicky and drunk on cheap red wine, he tells the story of their little house; back then it had been set apart from other buildings, and he tells Nicky that for a decade they swapped swords for farming tools. 

He tells him that they felt at peace here.

Nicky has been a warrior his entire life. History books are full of the fights that he has won, but they are also full of the ones he’s lost, and he can sense that he is losing this battle against himself when it comes to Yusuf.

But then, loving Yusuf doesn’t feel like losing.

There isn’t an exact moment when he looks up and thinks, this is it. This is when he learnt to fall in love again. It’s in a million moments in-between, from Albania onwards every moment has been an effort in relearning.

But if he has a gun to his head (which isn’t a funny joke according to Yusuf), to pick a moment… it will be this.

They take the bus to Valletta, under the excuse that they need some specific building tool, but really because Nicky asked Yusuf about the hotel card his old self carried like a talisman and Yusuf doesn’t seem to be able to deny him anything.

The hotel is small and family-run, and the old owner welcomes them back like long lost sons. She plies them with homemade honey rings, cannolo and date cakes while talking animatedly. As they talk, Yusuf absentmindedly passes over all the honey rings to Nicky’s plate, because although he likes them- he knows they’re Nicky’s favourite.

Yusuf doesn't even seem to be aware that he’s doing it, he’s midflow in a conversation, and his hand rests easily on Nicky’s leg under the table for a minute before he seems to realise, and almost blushing pulls it away. Afterwards they make their way back to their shared home and as they walk up the drive, Nicky feels so deeply content, and that there is no where else he would rather be then beside Yusuf in this house.

Loving Yusuf doesn’t feel like a lightning bolt, so much as a flower long tended finally blooming. 

He thinks about it over the next few days. He wants to be certain. Is this what he wants to feel real, or what he feels duty-bound to feel?

That weekend he has his first true argument with Yusuf, over the colour of the living room of all things. As his temper cools it doesn’t take him very long to realise he’s being an idiot, because only love could explain why he’s with a madman who wants to paint it a disgusting shade of green. What strikes him most though, is that his self discovery doesn’t seem to change anything between Yusuf and himself. 

He wants to celebrate this discovery with the man he loves, but what can he give to a man who has already done and seen it all? Then it hits him on a random Monday after dinner.

He has nothing to give but himself. 

He doesn’t plan anything but trusts his gut, and most importantly, Yusuf. That evening is the same as always, Nicky is reading a book that Yusuf has said he’d enjoy and Yusuf is doing the washing up following the dinner that Nicky cooked. 

Nicky stands and leans against the dinner table in the kitchen- he wants to be on equal grounds for this.

“Tell me of our first time?” he asks, knowing exactly the reaction it will elicit from Yusuf. He freezes for a moment, before carefully putting down whatever he’s holding and turning and looking at Nicky. Nicky can see a war going on inside him between wariness and hope.

“Why do you ask?”

“Because I want to know,” Nicky says with the boldness of one assured victory. He rarely has Yusuf on the back foot- he finds he enjoys it. 

“Tbilisi… we were travelling east to find the others from our dreams.”

Nick steps closer.

“...After Antalya, you asked me to shave you every few days. We stayed outside the city and it was summer.” Nicky crowds up against Yusuf, trapping him between his arms and the sink.

“And then…” Nicky asks, leaning forward so that he can almost feel Yusuf's words on his own lips.

“I knelt behind you… it was too hot for shirts and you leaned your head against my stomach with your eyes closed, and you looked….”

“What did I look like?” Nicky asks- he’s teasing but oh, it felt good. 

“... like you were praying” Yusuf is staring at him, and as Nicky places his fingers over Yusuf's hands, Yusuf takes a deep breath to try and centre himself. It doesn’t work. “..When I’d finished you opened your eyes and looked at me…you took the knife from my hand and pulled me down, and…”

Nicky kisses him. He has to.

They kiss deeply and Yusuf's fingers stroke reverently around Nicky’s waist with a gentleness that suggests he is amazed that he is allowed this, before Nicky slides his leg between Yusuf's and applies just the right amount of pressure. Yusuf's hands tighten on his waist and his fingers press would leave bruising if they didn't heal as fast, then he pulls away slightly and peppers kisses along Nicky’s jaw and neck. 

Nicky’s hands are around Yusuf's head, fingers play across the back of his neck. They share breaths in this small kitchen, Nicky pressed up against Yusuf, in a silence that feels like an eternity. 

“Show me,” Nicky all but sighs into Yusuf's ear “I am yours and new again.” 

The words seem to have the effect he’d hoped for as Yusuf nuzzles into his neck before pulling him to their bedroom where they’ve been sleeping side by side but carefully not touching until now.

Tonight that isn’t the case and as Nicky looks at Yusuf, he realises that this simmering need has always been there, that it has been stamped into his bones since Durres but only now makes itself known. 

He finds himself pushed gently down with Yusuf above him, and as Nicky’s hands slip under Yusuf’s shirt, Yusuf rests his forehead in the crook of Nicky’s shoulder and lets out the smallest of groans. The sound hits Nicky like a blow and, almost involuntary, his body lifts up to grind up again against Yusuf. 

Yusuf pulls away to take his shirt off, kneeling in between Nicky’s hips, and as Nicky looks at him, framed by the light- he curses himself that it’s taken this long to get where they are. 

Yusuf leans down and in between kisses, slowly helps Nicky with his clothes. He doesn’t hesitate, and undoes Nicky’s belt with the confidence of a man well-practised. 

That night he takes Nicky apart methodically and with the assurity of a man who knows what he’s doing. Nicky would feel guilty that he cannot return the favour, but Yusuf makes him incapable of such complicated thoughts and seems to enjoy Nicky's enthusiastic learnings.

Morning comes hidden in Yusuf’s touch and whispered devotion he’s mouthing into Nicky’s skin, bodies curled around one another. He kisses into Nicky’s shoulder while muttering in long-dead languages a liturgy of prayers.

For the first time since he woke up in Varna all that time ago, with the man he loves beside him, Nicky knows himself.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Annnndddd, it's done! 
> 
> I swear- I can't remember being this obsessed with a movie for ages.
> 
> Big thanks to FirecePassions for Betaing, I apologise for posting before hand, but I'll defo re-edit the chapter as I have no doubt you'll make some good suggestions.
> 
> Thank you everyone for the comments and kudos.
> 
> I've written a sequel-ish of some of the key scenes from Joes perspective so that should be up in a week or so.
> 
> Feel free to leave Kudos and comments at the bottom

It takes four years, and in the meantime, they take their time to relearn… well… everything.

Nicky feels like he’s slowly relearning things about himself. They spend more time with Andy and the rest of the team and he finds himself carving a new space for himself, one that’s welcomed and loved.

It isn’t perfect with his little family, they argue and are petty in the way that all humans are. Just because they’ve been given the time to learn from their mistakes doesn’t mean they do.

Yusuf and Nicky train and travel all over the world and when they take missions they work seamlessly. Yusef's training is brutal and Nicky slowly finds himself remembering and improving, able to hold his own in every other fight. Nicky pushes himself to relearn his sniping skills, spending six miserable and hard months relearning. He wants to be the best he can in order to protect his family.

The first time Yusuf dies in front of him on a mission, Nicky “loses his shit” according to Nile. That evening as they lay in bed curled up against one another, Yusuf quietly reassures him as Nicky continually runs his fingers across his shoulder where the bullets went in. He has to remind himself that while he may not remember it, he’s seen it happen many times before. Yusef tells him that when their time is finally up, they will go together.

The first time Nicky dies on a mission, he’s dead within moments. When he comes around Yusuf is furious with him, telling him not to be so reckless. It takes Andy to remind him that terror and anger were only heartbeats away from each other.

However, it’s not all training and missions. Nicky finds himself remembering things in random moments in random countries.

In Barcelona, he suddenly remembers an argument over religion he had years ago with Gaudi after too much red wine, and that he thinks that Barcelona's La Sagrada Familia Basilica is an architectural affront to all of humanity. He tells Yusuf and Booker this while they’re drinking sangria ona side street off of Las Ramblas, and Yusuf falls off his chair from laughing so hard.

In Mexico during Día de Muertos, he watches a young girl with her face painted like a skull hand Yusuf a flower as she and her family make their procession through the city. He suddenly sees Yusuf in an Allied outfit from World War II in front of him, handing the last of his food to a girl who looked like her. His heart swells with so much love at that moment he doesn’t know what to do with it.

In Moscow, he wakes up naked and half asleep in bed. As he pushes himself up onto his elbows and rubs the sleep out of his eyes, he finds a smirking Yusef sitting on a chair, legs propped up on the bed in nothing but his boxers—casually drawing a sleeping Nicky. He flips it around and shows him. Without thinking, Nicky says, “please destroy that one better than the drawings from Spain. I do not want my naked body in some random historical porn collection again.” It startles a laugh out of Yusuf and a promise to do better this time, and Nicky smiles as he crawls back into bed with him.

How can it be possible to love someone this much? How did he get to be this lucky?

All that time, Yusuf never complains — he pushes, prods and argues— but takes Nicky exactly as he is, and Nicky loves him more for it each day.

They get a call four years later from Andy saying that Quynh (still at the beginning of a thirty-year exile after the whole coming-back-from-the-dead-and-being-vengeful-before-regretting-it-because-she-loves-Andy-more thing) needs them. No one begrudges Andy time with Quynh when they’re not sure how much time she has left.

Quynh has discovered an organ trafficking ring in Vietnam that she wants to stop, so they head to Vietnam to regroup and in standard Andy format create a plan on the hoof as they’re about to assault the area.

It goes about as well as expected.

Nicky is on sniper and overwatch duty; Andy, Nile and Quynh are their shock and awe troops. Booker and Yusuf are on reinforcements.

Nicky takes a high point and shoots the guards and moments later sees that Booker and Yusuf are about to get attacked, so he does the sensible thing and shoots their would-be attackers. Sadly, this gives his position away to someone who has a Mk 19 belt-fed grenade launcher who takes aim at his position.

It’s about as much fun for Nicky as it sounds.

He runs down the stairs from his vantage point as metal explodes around him. The radio crackles to life with the worried tones of Booker and Yusuf. He ignores it all and jumps out of the second story onto a flimsy first story corrugated iron roof and feels both his femurs snap. They heal as he drags himself off the side and falls the final 10 feet onto the ground, finally out of the fucking machine grenade launcher’s line of sight.

There's a bright flash and things go dark for a while.

He comes back to Joe's concerned face over him.

It’s really painful. Nicky can feel his skull remaking itself, and the headache is immediate and present, throbbing with every breath.

He opens his eyes and sits up, for which Joe rewards him with a faint touch on his head and a look of relief. Nicky wants to say something, but they’re warriors first so they both move through the containers to get their much-needed revenge within moments.

They come across Booker who swears in some incredibly inventive French and is regrowing his index finger, having got rid of Nicky's new least favourite weapon. It reminds Nicky of the cannonball incident during the War of Independence in America. His headache grows, but he doesn’t have time to think about it. He assumes it's just a legacy of getting blown up.

They hear gunfire ahead and move towards it as one unit: Nicky takes front, Booker second and Joe last— just as it has been for centuries. The move fast and efficient, brutally taking down any of those stupid enough to get in their way.

They come across open ground and see Qunyh dragging a half-dead Nile behind some cover while Andy takes potshots at the last group of holdouts.

Nicky immediately knows they won’t last more than another fiveminutes before they’re flanked—their position is too exposed. Turning to Booker and Joe he says, “Saigon ‘72”. Both look at him and seem to want to ask more but there isn’t time, so Booker just nods and Joe gives one final glance back to him before breaking for the dead ground on the right. Nicky shouts over to Andy, who spends a second looking surprised before nodding to show she’s understood, and is pulling Quynh and Nile down as Booker distracts the enemy with an unnecessarily large explosion.

From there everything goes as smoothly as it can in a firefight, except Joe takes a bullet to the neck. Joe’s weapon falls from his hand and he grasps his neck to fruitlessly try tto stem the blood that's coming out between his fingers. Nicky has a flashback to Bosnia and slams the butt of his rifle into the shooter's face—killing him instantly—and sees black spots in front of him from the headache. The others move forward to clear the room, while Nicky stands over Joe and waits for him to come back from the dead, just as he always has and always will.

Anything else is unacceptable.

Joe comes back with a garbled breath, and Nicky rolls him over, knowing how uncomfortable it is to cough up the blood that settles in your lungs after deaths like these. He runs a hand over Joes back in comfort as he spits up blood onto the floor.

“Welcome back my love,” he says in Arabic, before helping Joe stand. They move forward as one to join the others in the fight.

They kill the last of them, find the trafficked men and women and load them into two 4x4 trucks as they move out. Booker, Andy and Quynh take the first truck; Joe, Nile and Nicky take the second. Nicky headache pounds with every second heartbeat.

“I’ll take rear,” Nicky calls out as they help the last victims into the back of the open backed truck, jumping in after them. They’ll need to make sure they’re not being followed, just as they did back in Korea. Joe looks at him as he does, and Nicky knows that look—Joe’s not worried, but he's concerned about something.

They’re not followed and make it to the outskirts of a local village. They get everyone out of the back and as Quynh talks to them, a girl no older than six clings to Nicky. He picks her up without a second thought and quietly calms her down in Vietnamese before she leaves with the rest of the group. He takes a deep breath and leans his head back against the metal of one of the vehicles as the headache pounds away. This is the first time he’s been blown up in 4 years, he wonders if it’s always this painful.  
They abandon the second vehicle and Andy tells them they’re driving until they make it close to the Laos border, and then they’ve got a nice hike across the border. Nicky is not looking forward to it and he glances at Joe who just rolls his eyes, clearly, he isn’t either. Joe winks at him and Nicky grins automatically.

Andy takes the first driving stint with Quynh as co-driver. The other four clamber into the back of the truck and try and bed down wherever they can. Joe sits against Nicky and he wordlessly lets Nicky bed down closest to the back entrance of the truck, with Joe further inside; being the big spoon to Nicky’s knife as Nile jokingly calls it.  
Nicky wets a rag and hands it over to Nile. “For the blood on your face,” he says lightly. He can see Joe out of the corner of his eye as Nile gratefully takes it and wipes the worst of the dried blood off, and Nicky knows something is up.

He thinks back on the fight, but there’s nothing about it that particularly stands out of the thousands of fights they’ve been in before. Nicky’s exhausted, his head hurts and he trusts Joe enough that if there’s something truly wrong he’ll just tell him.

“You look like shit,” Joe says, knocking his leg against Nicky’s  
.  
“As always Joe, you have a way with words,” Nicky jokes back, and Joe raises an eyebrow. “I’ve had a headache since the explosion,” Nicky says quietly. “It’s not too bad”, he’s lying. It feels worse. Joe frowns, there may be no physical scars after injuries but sometimes the mental scars remain, so he doesn’t push.

“I’ll take first watch,” Joe says and Nicky settles down to get some sleep, gun within arms reach and his face up against Joe's side using his thigh as a pillow.  
Nicky’s head throbs.

He feels Joe tense before tentatively placing the most chaste of kisses on the crown of Nicky’s head. His fingers gently curl around Nicky's head, carding through his hair. Nicky smiles to himself and tries to go to sleep.

-

Nicky jerks awake hours later, and his head feels like it’s about to split in two. He’s never experienced pain like it. He groans and feels himself curling up into the fetal position.

“Nicky… Nicky!” Joe says, shaking him. When he gets no response Joe slams his hands against the wall separating the front and back compartment and shouts, “Boss! Stop the truck, somethings wrong!” The wheels come to a screeching halt and Nicky lurches upright and leans over the back of the vehicle, vomiting up any food that’s left in him.

He feels Joe's hands on his back as the other two startle, both reaching for their weapons. Andy and Quynh jump out of the front and run to the back, clearly expecting a fight.

Nicky collapses against Joe's side and tries to focus on breathing.

“What’s wrong?” Andy barks, guns trained out down the road. She looks into the back of the truck and sees Nicky now curled up on the floor of the truck, hands clenched painfully around his head as Yusuf speaks to him their first languages, desperately trying to provide comfort. “Joe…. Joe!?” She shouts to get his attention.  
“I don’t know Andy, he just woke up like this!” He growls angrily, feeling totally impotent.

Quynh keeps her gun trained down the road as Andy clambers into the back and Nile pulls out an impressive medical kit from the back of the truck. Now that one of their own can die, they make sure to carry the right equipment. Nile is the designated medic by sheer virtue that she’s the youngest and still vaguely remembers what it’s like to be mortal. “Nicky, what’s wrong?” she asks, trying to pull his hands away. Nicky can barely get the garbled word, “head,” before he almost bites through his tongue as a wave of agony comes over him.

Joe's hands on him tighten.

“Fuck, we don’t have time for this,” Andy growls, “Booker, Quynh get us somewhere safe. I don’t give a shit where it is, but somewhere defendable where we can hole up.” Booker and Quynh move quickly and the truck shoots off down the road within moments.

Nile gets her torch and shines it in Nicky’s eyes and swears quietly to herself and looks at Joe and Andy, both trying hard to contain their concern. “One pupil is blown, the others a pinprick and they're barely responding to the light,” she says quietly, “something’s wrong with his head, I don’t know how to fix it.”

“He’s been off since he came back from the explosion earlier. He said he had a headache, I just assumed...” Joe trails off, furious at himself for not seeing this coming.  
“How?! How’s he been ‘off’?” Andy asks.

“He fought differently, like he used too…. He called me Joe.” Nile looks at him confused, “he’s only ever called me Yusuf for the last four years, he’s never called me Joe.”  
Andy turns to Nile, frustration clear in her voice, “pump him full of whatever pain meds we’ve got, he’ll go through them quickly but it’ll help until we can get somewhere safe.”

“And then what boss?” Joe asks, and Andy’s heart breaks at the look on Joe's face. He looks helpless and lost, and she hasn’t seen that look since they almost lost Nicky.  
“I don’t know Joe, but we’ll think of something,” she answers honestly, as Nile plunges the morphine pen into Nicky’s thigh.

\--

Nicky dreams.

He dreams of deserts, mountains, forests and seas. He dreams of impossible battles, death and blood. Soon the dreams all start merging into one. He takes one step and he’s standing outside the walls of Jerusalem, he takes another and he’s standing in Tiananmen square before the tanks roll in, a further step takes him outside the house he grew up in. Every step brings memories; the good and the bad.

Joe is standing beside him in most of them.

He feels someone carrying him and knows he's being moved somewhere. He hears voices but it hurts if he focuses too much on them.

His head feels like it’s burning.

He remembers his mother's laugh, the fear of his first battle and the respect and awe he felt when he first met Andromache. He remembers the loss of Quynh and the promises he made with himself and his immortal family. He remembers consoling Booker and almost bursting with pride as he trained Nile.

Mostly, he remembers Joe.

He remembers seeing him on the battlefield and knowing that he had found an equal warrior. He remembers killing him hundreds of times. He remembers Joe putting down his weapon before he did. He remembers when they walked away from the battlefield together, and he had looked across a small fire in the middle of a dessert and felt a kinship unlike anything else.

He remembers the thrill of fighting alongside Joe, who forced him to question and challenge all his previous beliefs.

He remembers the shame he felt when he first looked at Joe as anything other than a brother at arms.

He remembers the feel of Joe's muscles against the back of his head under the blazing sun of Tbilisi. He remembers praying for strength and opening his eyes to see Joe above him, holding a knife to Nicky’s throat and thinking a _love like this cannot be a sin_. He remembers curling his fingers in Joe's hair as he brought Joe down and kissed him.

He remembers what it was like to fall in love.

He remembers a hundred lifetimes of promises and adventures. A hundred lifetimes of love and passion, arguments and sadness.

He remembers Joe.

\--

He comes around lying on a sweat-soaked cot in a corner of a room. Quynh is sitting on the cot with his hand in her lap. She’s totally focused on the argument happening above them, and it’s making his brain rattle painfully in his head.

It reminds him of waking up in Dures. Except for this time he remembers.

He tries to speak and fails spectacularly, vertigo gripping him and black spots clouding his vision. He can already feel his mind starting to slip.

“No.Fucking.Way.” Joe snaps at Andy, squaring up like he wants to fight her.

“Joe,” Nile says quietly, “we’re running out of options. We don’t have any more pain meds and he’s getting worse, not better.”

“He’s only conscious for moments, and when he is he’s having fits. That’s no way for him to live. His mind isn’t healing right,” Booker says.

“That doesn’t mean you get to fucking kill him,” Joe almost shouts. “It’s not a reset button!”

He squeezes Quynh’s hand and she looks down and sees he’s conscious. “What do you want?” she asks him, and that silences the argument happening above them. Joe immediately kneels down next to the cot and takes his other hand.

“How long?” he asks them.

“Two days, but if you’re conscious now then you’re getting better. We just wait it out.” Joe says fiercely, daring the others to contradict him.

Nicky knows they don’t have time for that. He also knows he’s not getting better. Joe looks at him, “you remember,” he says, able to read it clear as day on Nicky's face. Nicky nods.

Nicky smiles weakly. “When our time is up, we go together,” remembering the exact words they promised each other long ago. “Now is not our time,” Nicky says confidently, and Joe looks devastated. Nicky hates that he’s done this to him. Again.

Quynh squeezes his hand as Joe rests his forehead against Nicky’s, steeling himself. “Come back to me,” Joe whispers fiercely and places a bruising kiss on Nicky's forehead. Nicky nods. It hurts, but it’s worth it.

Quynh takes the syringe from Nile and injects him as Joe holds his hand in a death grip, devastated and almost in tears.

The last thing he sees as he dies is Joe.  
-  
-  
-  
-  
-  
-  
He comes to, awake and conscious between one moment and another.

“Nicolo, wake up,” he hears Joe saying quietly in Italian, repeating it like a prayer. “Please Nicolo, please wake up”, and he sounds so quietly broken, as if he doesn’t expect Nicky to open his eyes.

The rest of their family collectively hold their breaths.

Nicky smiles as he opens his eyes and the first thing he sees is Joe.

“I am here,” he replies; clear-minded, happy and whole.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> What happens afterwards....

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Soooooooo
> 
> This was supposed to be the 5th chapter of Home, but it turns out I enjoy writing from Nicky's point of view more than Joes. So decided to mix it up. Heads up- there is a mention (vaguely) about historic slavery (mostly focused on the recovery aspect)
> 
> Honestly, this chapter was the hardest thing I've written in a long time (and there are still parts... including the ending) that I'm not 100% happy with- but I'd love to hear what you guys think. It seems that not thinking the whole story through before you publish means you write yourself into plot corners that are a bitch to get out off. So when I started writing ch 5 of home ties I was like... 0_0... how do I fix this...
> 
> I wouldn't say I got out of plot holes perfectly, but trust me- this is better then what was in my drafts. I also tried pretty hard to give amnesic Nicky and 'memory' Nicky different internal voices. Not sure if it's obvious but hey, at least I tried (in my head, Nicky is sneaky, snarky and full of trauma). Also, so much stuff has been cut from this draft...
> 
> Also, I've put 1 easter egg in here- the first two to comment and correctly guess... will get something (haven't decided what yet or how... but either way it amused me putting them in and I'll be amused it people can spot them).
> 
> As always- comments make the world go around- so feel free to leave them!

Nicky comes back to Joe alive and whole.

He remembers. 

The happiness their little family feels at that moment is almost palpable. Joe crawls into Nicky’s lap, and Nicky pulls Joe in. They haven’t been separated for more than a week in the last four years, but no one can deny that it feels different with Nicky returning to himself. The others give them space and leave them for the evening. 

Joe doesn’t say anything as Nicky holds him, and the relief he feels to have his old Nicky back is so strong Nicky can almost taste it. 

They say almost nothing for the entire night, but for the first time in four years, they both understand each other loud and clear.

 **JOE**

Joe wakes with his head on Nicky's thigh while Nicky is sitting up against the headboard. He’s moved Joe in his sleep so that Joe’s squashed between the wall and Nicky is closest to the door. His fingers distractedly card through Joe's hair, but his eye remains trained on the door that separates them from the rest of their family. 

There is literally only one person in the entire world that can move Joe without waking him, and finally, finally, Joe has him back. He would wonder how Nicky did it, but Joe hasn’t really slept at all in the last two days, terrified with what was happening with Nicky. 

Nicky’s nail scratch along his scalp, the pressure slightly harder than before. He hasn’t taken his eyes off the door but seems to know Joes awake. Joe gives a contented hum and pushes his face further into Nicky’s thigh because he both loves the feeling and doesn’t want to be awake yet. 

Then he notices the handgun within reaching distance of Nicky’s other hand. 

Nicky doesn’t say anything but looks down at Joe, and Joe knows what’s coming out of his mouth before he does. 

“You’ve forgiven her?” Nicky asks, sounding surprised as he looks down at Joe. “Even after everything she did, you still forgive her?”

He’s talking about Quyhn and what she did to Joe when she came back. 

Joe realises he probably shouldn’t be surprised by Nicky’s reaction. That this is the first thing he’s thinking about with his memories returns. Nicky can be a grade-A asshole when he wants to be- everyone in their little family knows this. He’s a sneaky conniving bastard who can hold a grudge for a century and few things truly make him mad; injustice, betrayal, and someone hurting Joe - Quinyh did all three. 

The rub is that Joe _really_ has already forgiven her. Just as he’s almost forgiven Booker. Quick to anger, and even quicker to forgiveness. Ultimately, it’s easier to forgive Quynh because he even though it hurt like a mother-fucker, he was the only one hurt. Also, she’s been pivotal in helping Joe the last four years, so desperate to earn his forgiveness and apologise in any way she could. She hadn’t joined the search when Nicky first went missing, not sure if she was wanted, but she’d answered every question he had about the sea no matter how painful it was for her.

In the four years Nicky and him have gallivanted around the world, Quynh has wisely been giving Nicky as much space as she can. She hasn’t abused Nicky’s lack of memory to trick him into forgiving her. While the two of them have been re-learning each other, she’s been protecting Andy. Joe loves Booker and Nile, but he’d rather take on entire armies then fight Quynh. There’s no one else that Andy could be safer with. 

He's had four years to forgive her, and he wants Nicky to forgive her. Nicky and Quynh had started to take the first of the tentative steps towards reconciliation, Nicky’s fury burning at a low simmer, but everything was forgotten in the explosion five years ago, including his slow journey to forgiving her. 

He doesn’t say any of this to Nicky though because he knows it won’t change anything.

Nicky won’t understand that, not now. Nicky has a million memories to process, and the most recent ones crowding his brain are probably of Quynh hurting Joe, even while Joe’s perfectly healed and crowded up against him. Joe's own search for Nicky during those three months in Bulgaria is enough nightmare fuel for a lifetime or however many he has left, and he knows the incident gives Nicky nightmares. 

Although there is nothing more in the world he would want than to have his family back together, he’ll let Nicky process his own trauma at his own pace. 

“Where do you want to go?” he asks instead. 

“Somewhere she isn’t,” Nicky says, eyes still trained on the door. 

They settle on Bangkok. 

Andy looks annoyed when they tell her but Quynh says she understands and Joe tells them they’ll come back soon. Booker and Nile wisely stay out of the way. Copley organises their accommodation. 

Nicky doesn’t say anything to Quynh the entire time and doesn’t let Joe out of his sight. 

As they leave, Nile gives them an email account, laptop and phone, and Andy threatens physical violence if they don’t contact them at least once a week. Otherwise, she’ll do a repeat of ‘53. Even Nicky winces at the threat. 

They make it to Bangkok after a three-day circuitous route through a mixture of trains, buses, cars and in one memorable case, in the back of a drug-smuggling van. They pick up new burner phones and go to the address that Copley’s given them. Joe and Nicky walk in, take one look around the lovely high rise which is a modern and minimalist flat with the lovely views, glance at each other and then turn around and leave. The flat is expensive, clean, modern... and it’s not them.

Instead, they call up a contact and end up in the Yan Nawa district. They pay a ludicrous amount in cash to a very confused man for a crappy two-bedroom apartment with a too-hard bed, thin walls, some barely-there water pressure and what Joe hopes is just mould in the corners. Nicky gives a wave to the children staring at them from across the small open courtyard while Joe makes up some bullshit cover story to their new landlord. 

It’s perfect. 

They go into their normal routine for any new place, Nicky places various weapons around the house while Joe moves the bedroom furniture around so he’s happy with where it is. They throw their bags in the unused bedroom and wordlessly head out to scout the area and grab food; in that order.

When they’re walking the streets, relearning a city they haven’t been to in decades, Nicky asks Joe not to tell the rest of them the exact address of where they are. He’s being paranoid and he knows it, but Joe will humour him because he loves him. 

It’s a thing they learnt at couples counselling. Respecting boundaries and finding middle ground.

Joe is still going to text Andy tomorrow though to say they’re safe because even mortal, she can still scare him shitless. 

That night Nicky fucks Joe against the rickety wooden table in the kitchen with a wildness that Joe adores and has missed. The last four years have seen Joe top more often than not, if only because he has hundreds of years of memories and unlike Nicky, he doesn’t really have a preference. However, tonight Nicky seems focused on returning the last four years worth of favours back in one evening. Nicky nails his prostate repeatedly as Joe grips the table and completely fails at being quiet. Nicky covers Joe's mouth with one hand and tells him that if the neighbours didn’t suspect before they certainly would now. Joe doesn’t care and bites and sucks down on the fingers out of spite. 

It’s fucking filthy in a way their sex is hasn’t been in ages and Joe loves every moment of it. 

They finish and Nicky pulls away to get a towel and Joe just about manages to make his legs work so that he’s only leaning on the table as opposed to collapsing against it. He hears Nicky come up behind him and give a small quiet laugh. He places a soft kiss between Joe's shoulder blades as he reaches in between Joe's legs with the damp towel. Joe hasn’t felt this strung out in…. well... years. 

The damp cloth becomes insistent and Nicky’s mouth migrates from his back to kissing and biting Joe's neck in a way that he knows affects Joe. 

“Nicky,” Joe warns.

“Hm…” Nicky says innocently. Sneaky little shit. His other hand comes around Joe's waist and the damp cloth falls to the floor, all pretence forgot. Joe catches one of Nicky’s hands with his own and threads their fingers together. He can barely remember his own name, let alone go for another round. He doesn’t say anything but Nicky hums in understanding and pulls Joe to the bedroom, folding himself around Joe till he’s happy.

Joe goes to bed content in their crappy apartment.

 **NICKY**

Nicky wakes up to Joe still sleeping and allows himself exactly one minute of blind panic. Any more, and he knows that it’ll wake Joe up and he’ll be worried. The last thing he wants to do is worry Joe.

Nicky is becoming increasingly aware that he’s barely holding it together, but as he wakes up one week into staying at their tiny apartment wrapped up in Joe, it’s almost enough to push the panic away. If he closes his eyes he can conjure up a million perfect other mornings just like this.

Which ironically is now exactly the problem. He’s gone from having too few memories to having too many memories. 

Many of them are awful. Too many of them have an injured Joe in them. 

He tries to pull away slowly. Nicky knows Joe will be out for at least another hour and he’s already planning to forgo the shower in case the pipes wake Joe up. He is thinking of the words he will need to scrawl to say where he’s going when Joe decides to forgo centuries of tradition and wake up early. 

“Nicky,” he says, breath tickling against Nicky’s neck and voice heavy with sleep, “what is it?” 

He feels Joe rise to one arm behind him, and Nicky rolls onto his back without thinking because bedhead Joe is too attractive to not look at at any opportunity. Nicky doesn’t say anything because if he does he knows it’ll worry Joe. Yet Joe knows, he always knows. “Talk to me, Nicky. What are you thinking about?”

Nicky immediately goes to his fallback plan, the same plan he’s been very much enjoying the last seven days. He pushes Joe back onto the bed and kisses him, morning breath be damned. Nicky has had four years of mindblowing sex but he is acutely aware that it hadn’t quite been the same for Joe because Nicky didn’t have access to centuries of experience. So now he wants to make up for lost time. If it also happens to distract Joe then ‘two-birds-one-pepple’, or whatever the phrase is in English.

For example, last night he had felt Joe looking at him slightly concerned, as they’d sat on the sofa while Nicky had re-read the same page for ten minutes because his mind had been replaying memories of losing Joe to Quynh. So Nicky had put it down, straddled Joe and proceeded to try and recreate fond memories from Rio. They’d almost broken the sofa but Joe hadn’t looked concerned which was the most important thing.

“You,” Nicky says simply. Again, and very important here, not technically a lie. Most of his many memories do actually involve Joe. They’re just sadly not all pleasant ones. 

Now he slowly moves down Joe's chest while peppering it kisses. His arms go underneath Joe's thighs and he pulls them apart slightly. Joe had fallen asleep naked, and Nicky mouths open kisses just above Joe's hips. 

‘Nickyyyyy…” he groans quietly, Nicky looks up and gives his most innocent face that he knows Joe likes. Joe’s head thunks against the pillow and he brings his hands in front of his face. Nicky hears him quietly curse in a mixture of various regional Arabic dialects, which he only does when he’s either really flustered or really aroused. Nicky thinks he hears Joe mutter “I’m going to regret this” to himself, before giving one last almighty sigh and moving to sit up.

Nicky tries not to look petulant in between Joe's legs but knows he’s probably failed. When it’s clear that normal service isn’t going to resume, Nick sits up.

“While I have very much enjoyed the last week and cannot believe I’m cock-blocking myself, talk to me. What’s going on?” Joe asks. He waits patiently for Nicky to answer, just as he’s been doing for the last four years... which Nicky feels is kind of the problem. The worst part is that Joe looks concerned at the same time, and Nicky really dislikes being the reason for it. Nicky also hates that he’s seen that look on his face pretty often in the last four years, and he loathes that until he got his memories back he didn’t recognise that look immediately. 

His fingers nervously trace patterns on Joe's thighs without him realising, but he doesn’t say anything. Joe leans forward and kisses him lightly on the lips, barely more than a feather kiss which Nicky tries very very hard not to chase.

“Breakfast?” Joe asks and Nicky nods. He wanders into the bathroom, and Nicky finds himself putting his clothes on like armour. Joe is fully dressed with a satchel over his side and Nicky realises that Joe wants to go out for breakfast even though they’ve got enough food in the house. Joe’s taking him outside the flat, because he thinks Nicky won’t distract him with sex if they’re in public (wrong). However, it does mean Nicky’s distraction plan has clearly been truly rumbled- although to be fair, it had never been very subtle in the first place. 

It’s going to be one of ‘those’ talks. 

They set off and Joe doesn’t seem to have a direction in mind. They walk for a while in companionable silence before ending up at a small cafe where they order too-sweet coffee and several small breakfast dishes. Joe grins at him as Nicky makes a face when drinking the coffee.

“How’s the coffee?” He asks, already knowing the answer; _I know that somethings going on, please talk to me._

“Vietnamese, very sweet” Nicky responds, sliding the last of his eggs over to Joe who eats them; _I know you are trying very hard for me, just as you have for the last few years, and I love you more for it each day. I don’t want to worry you, I’m dealing with it._

“I found a Muay Thai gym that I was thinking of going to today, they’re looking to hire,” Joe says casually; _if you need time then I’ll give it. I’m happy to wait as long as you need, I just want to know you’re ok._

“Want company?” Nicky stubbornly replies; _It is not important and I am dealing with it. I really don’t want you to worry._

Joe sighs, loudly. 

They finish their food, and as their plates are taken Nicky fights the very strong urge to fidget. Joe reaches down and pulls out a small sleek laptop from his bag. “I want to show you something,” he says as he clicks away. Eventually turning the laptop around to show Nicky.

On the screen is their joint email account. One they set up years ago when email was starting to be a thing, and one they’ve shared together ever since. The one that until this very moment Nicky had entirely forgotten about. Booker had offered to give them separate ones as he thought it was odd for them to share an email account. But quite frankly the whole internet thing is kind of beyond Nicky and he shares almost everything with Joe, so an email account is nothing in the grand scheme of things. 

It takes Nicky a moment to understand what he’s being shown. Buried among many emails, including a worrying amount of Bored Panda emails, are hundreds of emails from different doctors, academic and medical institutions. He glances down at them and it’s rapidly apparent that they’re about either the brain, amnesia, trauma or some variance of all three.

Nicky would bet a considerable amount that there are similar emails that go back for at least four years. 

“What did you tell them?” Nicky asks as he scrolls through the messages, surprised he hadn’t thought of this himself. 

Joe shrugs, “whatever I need to to get the information that I think might help you”, completely unconcerned about morality or duplicity when it comes to Nicky's wellbeing. Nicky’s heart does the complicated thing it’s been doing for the last week and if he’s honest with himself, he isn’t really surprised. He has willingly sacrificed, and would do so again in a second, his morals in the defence of Joe.

Nicky clicks through a couple of them. One is from a Brazilian doctor, where Joe is pretending to be a researcher from Turkey. Joe, because he’s Joe, has not only managed to sweet-talk the poor doctor into sending the report but also has a standing invite to dinner. Another academic professor in Austin, Texas, replies to Joe's question and asks him out for drinks. Nicky glances over the email and understands about every tenth word in it. 

“How much of this do you understand?” He asks, glancing up.

“Now… everything I’m sent. I’ve managed to get quite the reputation for asking strange questions about the potential regrowth of brain tissue and how it affects memory.” Joe answers. He stares at Nicky for a beat before continuing, “I’ve always thought of you as a living miracle Nicky, but when you got all your memories back in one go you achieved the impossible.”

“You continually think too highly of me,” Nicky tries to joke back, and it lands badly. Joe levels a stare at him, one Nicky received on an almost daily basis in the months after they’d stopped killing each other during the crusades. Nicky calls it the ‘you are an idiot’ stare- patent pending. 

“When someone loses their memories, they return slowly if at all. All of yours came back at once and we had to kill you before you got better. The word traumatic barely covers what happened to you. What you did was impossible, Nicky… And we both know there are always repercussions with the impossible”. Nicky opens his mouth to tell Joe he’s fine, but he knows he’ll be lying outright to Joe then and he hates doing that. “We have as much time as you need, you’re hurting and I want to help,” Joe says.

“You’ve already put enough time in, and you spent four years…” Nicky counters.

“...I’d wait for another hundred more. Just as you would.” Joe interrupts stubbornly.

“You shouldn’t have to though!” Nicky says exasperated, annoyed that they’re now almost having an argument over this.

“But I want to, just like you’ve done,” Joe counters, and Nicky has very little to respond to that because, in theory, all they should have is time. Except, now- they don’t. 

Andy isn’t getting any younger and Joe and Nicky have already been gone four years, only seeing Andy during missions. It’s only with his memories back that the strangeness of not having Quyhn there stands out. 

He worries if he is being petty. He worries that every day they spend here is time they don’t spend with Andy. Yet just like Joe and Nicky, Andy and Quyhn are a matching pair, you get both or neither. Nicky is selfish, but even he won’t split Quynh from Andy during the last years they have left together. 

For the first time in an age, time isn’t on their side. It’s a finite resource. 

Nicky loves Andy, and more importantly, Joe loves Andy. He had considered for a moment sending Joe back to their family until he gets whatever is going on in his head out of his system. The worst part is Nicky knows that Joe would hate it but agree if he thought that was what Nicky wanted. However, the thought produced such a gut-punch of wrongness inside Nicky that he’d immediately dismissed it.

Nicky knows he needs to get over his issues on Quynh and detangle them from _that_ time, and the million other hang-ups that the memories have brought back. He needs to learn not to be scared of the nine hundred years worth of memories that cling to him. 

The sheer amount and weight of the memories are so heavy and he doesn’t have the luxury of them slowly building up over time as he had previously. Instead, the full force of them is suddenly just there. He needs to learn to shoulder the burden of his past.

Before Vietnam, he’d found himself in some strange bubble where everything he experienced, did or saw was often for the first time. Now, everything is overlaid with a hundred different memories; some good, many bad. 

Yet how can Nicky tell Joe that? How can Nicky tell him that the sheer depth of his memories and feelings terrify him? Not when Joe is clearly so ecstatic to have ‘the old’ Nicky back. He doesn’t want to hurt Joe any more than he has over the last four years. But it’s clear that not talking is also hurting Joe, making it an awful catch-22 situation.

“Give me time?” Nicky asks and Joe reaches across the table, other people be damned, to interlace their fingers.

“Always.” He replies kindly. “I have some things I need to do, I’ll see you at the flat. I also saved a list of a couple of NGOs that I thought you might like. They’re all taking volunteers.”Nicky’s heart skips a beat. Of course Joe would have already come up with a plan for how Nicky can channel this restless energy, while all Nicky’s done is be self-indulgent and wallow. Clearly, Joe thinks that they’ll be here for a while. 

It’s not always missions and killings, sometimes it’s years of strange jobs as they move from place to place. Nine hundred years worth of experience can be helpful. 

Nicky gives him one of his small smiles, too touched to say thanks. 

Joe winks at him and Nicky grins, it’s a pavlovian response after 900 years.

“I’ll see you this evening,” Joe says, before leaving Nicky by himself with the laptop. 

Nicky watches him go, pulls the laptop closer and starts going through the emails to try and understand it all while thinking about what to say that evening. He’s never run away from a fight, and he isn't about to start now; even if it is just against his own psyche. 

**JOE**

Joe takes the day for himself, happy that things are finally moving in the right direction. He checks out the gym, hands over false papers and easily beats one of the other staff members there in a mock fight. It gets him an offer of a job and a start date. The rest of the day he spends doing odd jobs around the city, trying to very pointedly not think about Nicky.

He is a big enough man to realise he utterly fails. 

Nicky’s been off all week, and while the sex has been truly mindblowing and phenomenal, Joe knows that Nicky’s hiding something. Nicky’s sheer normality in the face of all he had gone through was enough to tell Joe that something was wrong. 

However, he knows from hard-won experience it rarely ends well when someone forces Nicky to do something he doesn’t want to, you need to get Nicky to want to do it. So he goes back to the flat and he settles down to a pirated Chinese movie with bad subtitles to wait for Nicky. He hears the door open and Nicky walks in, places a distracted kiss on the top of Joe's head and wanders past him into the bedroom to dump their bag. 

Joe hears Nicky come up behind the sofa, and his arms come around Joe's neck as he rests his head on Joe's shoulder, leaning over the back of the sofa. 

“Do you know why I read?” Nicky asks him. Joe shrugs, Nicky has always been a reader. Sebastian might have had his name bastardised to Booker, but Nicky will always be the bibliophile of their little family. 

“... I do it so I can steal other people's words… I read because maybe one day I can find the phrase that can describe the enormity of how you make me feel,” Nicky says into Joe's neck. “I know so many words for love, but I’ve never found one that explains what I feel for you.” It’s probably the most romantic thing Nicky has told him in literally decades, but Joe says nothing and brings a hand up to clasp Nicky's joined ones. 

“Before Vietnam, I thought I knew what it was to be in love. Then I woke up, and I realised that what I felt was nothing compared to now. Before the accident, I hadn’t even realised how… encompassing it was, but in Vietnam, I went from being in love with you to this…. feeling… overnight. It’s like I started swimming in a stream and suddenly I am in the middle of the sea storm.” 

Joe can’t help the tiniest of unconscious flinches at the analogy, and Nicky turns to kiss Joe lightly on the shell of his ear, “sorry,” he says in Italian, “bad example”. Joe just squeezes Nicky's arm and forgives him. It’s only because he’s so close that he feels Nicky hesitate before he says the next words. “Before Vietnam, I never realised how heavy the weight of our memories are. There are so many of them Joe, and they are not all good. I remember all we have been through, all I have done and I am terrified of it. All of this...all these memories... and waking to Quynh there… it all just got mixed in my head and I don’t know how to fix it.”

Joe is amazed at the false calmness in his voice as he says to Nicky, “do you want time alone to work it out?” The implicit question of ‘do you want me to go?’, hangs there between them.

“Cazzo No!” Nick spits out and his arms tighten around Joe as if the very idea disgusts him. Joe feels strangely vindicated at Nicky's sheer abhorrence of the idea. Nicky mumbles something in old Genoese into Joe's skin, and Joe turns his head to look at him questioningly, heads now so close they’re almost kissing. “...I tell you how broken I still am, and all you want to do is help even if it hurts you. What have I done to deserve you?” he repeats. 

“By being a good man,” Joe replies immediately, believing every word. 

“If I am a good man, it is only because you have made me one,” Nicky says. “I know I should forgive her, but she took you and I… I was willing to do anything to get you back.” And suddenly, Joe realises what this is about. 

This Nicky’s darkest secret- the thing Nicky is struggling with most in his newly discovered memories. 

The time he thinks he failed Joe. 

He’s thinking about what happened in the eighteenth century. They’ve talked about it, but it’s a scar that has never truly healed between the two of them, but for very different reasons. Nicky has always hated slavers, kidnappers and traffickers, but since the 1700’s he has gone after them with the same religious zeal that he fought with in the crusades. 

That was the century when Joe was taken. It’s their worst century. 

At the dawn of the 1700s, Andy had gone into the hinterlands of Central Asia and told them she would see them ‘soon’. With nothing better to do, the two travelled aimlessly and the next decade was spent either fighting each other or fighting someone else- normally the British Empire, a fuck you to the place that took their sister. They also fought between themselves in a way they hadn’t since the crusades; Joe spitting bile through misplaced worry, and Nicky’s quiet fury masking the guilt of losing his sister. 

True love hurts, and a love that had lasted over six hundred years can be deadly.

They were barely making it work when Joe was taken in the middle of a battle and carted halfway around the world away from Nicky. 

It had taken Nicky, and Andy when she joined him, over a decade to find Joe. Joe had asked Andy once what it was like while he was gone. She’d told him that he had been feral in the years that it had taken to get Joe back. Nicky had told him that every instinct he had went out the window when Joe's wellbeing was concerned. He had told Joe that there had been no line he would not, and did not, cross to get him back. 

Joe himself had never thought for a moment during that awful time that Nicky had abandoned him. They’d been separated before, and they’d been reunited. True to form, a decade after Joe had been taken, Nicky had found him half away around the world helping people escape at night, unwilling to leave those less fortunate behind.

Nicky had demanded ‘justice’ for Joe and between the three of them, they killed everyone Nicky felt deserved it for hurting Joe. 

Many people died.

Afterwards, they had needed to rest, and Joe had needed to heal. Through a series of long and convoluted events that neither liked, they had ended up in Malta. Joe remembers the years afterwards as some of the hardest since the two of them woke up on the battlefield all those years ago. The entire time, Nicky’s strength and devotion to Joe was unwavering; a mixture of love and penance for perceiving himself having ‘failed’ Joe. 

Nicky had kept their swords sharpened and by the door but otherwise, they rarely used them. They slept in the same room but separately, and over many nights told each other the story of their separation. Nicky had _hated_ that Joe had known hunger for so many years, and because he’s always shown love in actions, planted a herb garden and took to the role of cook, something he never really lost. 

Joe had found the journey of recovery hard, his focus constantly slipping, untethered and unmoored. Joe thought Nicky was endlessly and needlessly patient, had argued with him that he could leave until Joe fixed himself. Nicky told Joe he was an idiot. 

Those years were demonstratively hard at the beginning, but slowly they had got better and afterwards they had been stronger than before. Ironically, Nicky sees himself at his worst then, the time when he failed to protect Joe. Joe just mostly chooses to focus on the man who found and remade him.

No wonder the Quynh thing has thrown him. Joe feels like an idiot for not seeing this coming. 

“Oh my love,” Joe says, meaning every word with a thousand more unsaid but understood. 

“You of all people shouldn’t be comforting me over this,” Nicky says.

“I am the only one who should be providing comfort on this,” he says and kisses Nicky lightly. “You have never abandoned me and you are one of the kindest men I know.”

Nick brushes a short curl behind Joe's ear needlessly, as if looking for an excuse to touch Joe. “If I am, it is only because you have made me that,” Nicky says quietly in Arabic, bumping their heads lightly together, “I didn’t have it in my heart when we met, or in those awful years it took to find you, and I certainly didn’t have it in my heart when I woke up in Durres. You have taught it to me every time.”

He kisses Joe lightly on the lips, and his thumb absently rubs against Joe's chest, as if reassuring himself of Joe's heartbeat. 

“I know I should forgive her. What she went through…” he trails off, but Joe hears the silent words- if anyone should understand the madness of the sea, it’s him. But it’s hard when the memories of Quynh are tied to the 1700’s. He feels the change come over Nicky, clearly steeling himself for something. Ready to go to battle with himself because he thinks it’s what Joe needs. 

“Tomorrow,” Joe tells him, and all but pulls him over the side of the sofa. “Tonight is just for us.”

 **NICKY**

Just as he always has, Joe manages to make Nicky feel better through the mere act of being himself. His worst humours and thoughts had never been secret from Joe, who had been on the receiving end of them when they had first met and had seen almost every form of them since then. 

Nicky knows that he is only a good man because Joe made him one and Nicky will always be the best version of himself for Joe- he deserves nothing less. 

Nicky had been willing to burn the world to the ground to get Joe back in the 1700s, and he had again five years ago. Nicky sometimes wonders if he should dislike this tendency in himself; the parts were decency, kindness and any type of fucking morality go out the window for Joe's safety. But Nicky also thinks Joe has the self-preservation skills of a wet lemming if it means he can help others, so the tendency stays. 

That morning, while he had been sitting in the coffee shop, googling overly complicated scientific words and picking at the open wound that was Quyhn in his mind. He realised he was truly angry at everything she made him remember. Joe’s been hurt so many times in the past and Quynh has brought that all screaming back to the forefront, and he hasn’t had almost five years to get over it like the rest of them have. Nicky somehow has to learn how to separate those very tangled thoughts. 

He has to forgive his sister so they can end their self imposed exile. He’s never stopped loving her, but forgiveness is harder. 

The two of them watch the rest of the movie but neither of them really pay attention to it, Nicky knows he seems subdued. They go to bed early. It isn’t a melancholic night, but it’s pensive and quiet.

Nicky insists on sleeping half on top of Joe, head on his chest and listening to his heartbeat with the rest of his body curled around Joe. 

Joe’s fingers trace random patterns from Nicky's head to his shoulders and Nicky’s memories tell him that he only gets like this when something bad has happened to Joe.

Quynh.

New York.

Merrick.

South Africa. 

Mexico

Russia.

Minas Gerás.

The list goes on and on until it goes all the way back to 1099.

He finally goes to sleep to the steady beat of Joe's heart around him.

\--

They get up early the next day and go about their normal routine. Joe doesn’t ask about the previous night. 

Instead, while Joe is singing loudly (and badly) in their tiny shower, Nicky steals Joe's phone. It only takes 2 attempts to crack his password; it's a mixture of the year they met and the year they were in Tbilisi. Joe is, if nothing else, a romantic at heart and predictable with technology.

He realises there really only is one other person in the entire universe that can help him get over all of this. They’re also the last person in the world he wants to speak to. 

“Suffering in the past does not justify the torment of another in the future,” Nicky tells himself.

Yet how do you go about forgiving someone for doing something unforgivable? And what Quyhn did was unforgivable, she created a situation in which Nicky almost lost Joe. Again.

He considers for a moment just using Andy as an intermediary but he decides he’s not that petty. He takes Quynh's number and composes three different messages of varying lengths and topics before deciding to go for the simple but straightforward approach. Classic Nicky.

> It’s Nicky. Thailand is as hectic and colourful as the last time we were here. 

It may not have been called Thailand then, but it had still been an interesting trip. He can’t talk about forgiveness immediately, but he can try and remind himself of all the reasons why he once loved his sister.

Joe comes out of the shower, glances at Nicky and knows immediately what he’s doing but says nothing. Instead, he kisses Nicky and tells he’s off to the gym while Nicky talks about going to check out a couple of NGOs. 

Quynh doesn’t answer immediately, but Nicky isn’t expecting her to. The thing with immortals is time as a concept is strange, weeks can sometimes seem like moments. While they wait, Joe and Nicky throw themselves into embracing Thailand. It can’t just be the two of them all the time. They slowly learn to find friends in the city. Joe takes Nicky to a weekly BBQ and fight night at his gym and Nicky meets Joe's new friends as they chat over beers while watching the fighters go up against each other in mock fights. The fighters are no more than children to Nicky, and already a number of them clearly adore Joe who looks so serious as he talks through how to improve their techniques. He’s a brilliant teacher, but an even better mentor to them.

Nicky finds an NGO focused on recycling that’s small but passionate and makes friends with fellow local volunteers. Weeks pass and they get invited to a wedding in the countryside. They go, dance, and immensely enjoy themselves while eating food that Joe thinks is too spicy while Nicky thinks it isn’t spicy enough. 

The entire time Nicky keeps the phone by his side. 

Weeks later, as Joe tries to fit another dish into their fridge that’s been foisted upon them by well-meaning neighbours, Nicky’s phone goes off.

> Nicky, I hope you are well. I went to Thailand when I came back and took Andy. It has changed a lot, hasn’t it. I like most of the new changes. We very much enjoyed Chiang Mai. We smoked hashish to watch the sunset and then had to evade the police while Andy thought our legs were melting. I think the drugs affected her more as she is mortal. Let me know if you want recommendations for Bangkok. Quynh.

He grins to himself because of all the things he expected, it wasn’t (but also entirely was) what he was expecting to hear from her. He shows it to Joe, who laughs long and loud and immediately texts Andy, who merely responds; at least there are some benefits of mortality [Penguin Emoji]. (Nile has been teaching them emojis, and Andy has taken to just using whichever one she felt like in her texts. She compares them to Egyptian hieroglyphs.)

Again, Joe doesn’t push him on why he’s talking to Quynh, but it clearly makes him happy so Nicky asks for the recommendations. From there, over the next month, he slowly talks more often with his elder sister. They never discuss anything of importance, but it’s a start. He sends her photos of things he knows she’d like, and she tells him things about her new life. She tells him that she finds the whole concept of cookbooks strange and telenovelas are her new favourite thing. That doesn’t like Shakespeare, she’s undecided on Freud, and she’s teaching herself car mechanics.

Clearly, she’s being coached by someone. 

Nicky is 99% sure it’s Andy with a hint of Joe. 

A few more weeks into their extended stay Joe comes back riding a new moped and with a glint in his eye while Nicky is playing the game ‘Words with Friends’ on his phone with Andy. They’re currently playing it in Russian, so Nicky is losing horribly. Talking to Quynh seems to have opened the floodgates and now all four of them are messaging him separately. 

He desperately misses them. 

“Stop being a millennial and just staring at your phone," Joe says. It’s his new favourite joke as they get closer to 1000, and Nicky still smiles even after hearing it for the hundredth time. “Pack a bag for a couple of nights, I want to take you somewhere.” 

They grab the bare essentials and follow the traffic until they hit the countryside. After a while, they stop by the side of the road because Joe says he’s hungry (and not because he’s lost and needs directions… even though it clearly is). He still hasn’t told Nicky where they’re going, so Nicky buys a popsicle and innocently sucks at it as Joe comes back from the shop. Joe’s eyes darken and he sighs heavily as he gets back on the bike. “Tease,” he mutters in Russian, and Nicky grins and finishes the rest of it quickly before using the excuse of the moped to put his arms around Joe just that little bit too tight and pull himself flush against Joe's back.

if Joe squirms on the moped then it just makes the journey more interesting. 

They go for another hour and as the sun's setting pulls through an old village by the river, they go past it and head upstream before coming to a small house tucked away on the bank. Joe confidently goes inside and Nicky follows. It’s a basic open plan house which backs directly over the river, meaning that it is half balanced on a jetty with floor to ceiling windows overlooking the view. Reeds tuck in around the jetty and low rice fields stretch on the other side of the river bank as far as the eye can see. The home is sparsely but tastefully furnished, a perfect balance between modern and traditional. There’s even a large hammock outside on the jetty that can fit two people who want to watch the sunset. 

It’s stunning. 

Nicky heads outside and settles himself in the hammock. Joe comes out a moment later and settles in the hammock around Nicky, head resting on Nicky’s shoulder.

“Whose house is this Joe?” He asks a half answer already formed in his head.

“Thank you for trying,” Joe says, not answering the question. “I know you’re doing it for the rest of us, and you’re finding it hard.” 

“This is her house isn’t it?” Nicky finally asks. Joe tenses but doesn’t deny it. 

“This is their Malta,” Joe explains, “Andy and her suggested it...”

Nicky doesn’t say anything, thinking about all it means as the water laps quietly at the jetty. He understands what she’s offering by letting them be there, he doesn’t think he’d ever let her come to Malta, that’s for him and Joe. 

“... and for a woman who spent centuries drowning, she seems unfashionably fascinated by water,” Joe quips. 

“That’s probably why,” Nicky jokes back and whatever tension there is passes between the two of them as Joe relaxes fully against him.

-

Evening turns to night and they make their way inside to explore the small house properly. Joe jokes that it has a “...working toilet Nicky! Andy’s become civilised!” At first glance, there seems to be a disturbing lack of weapons until they find a bag of guns and swords in the closet. Nicky peruses the bookshelf while Joe moves the bed. Nicky would offer to help but he knows it’s neither wanted nor needed. 

The shelves are filled with a variety of languages and topics, most new. The Quynh from Nicky's memories was always inquisitive and wanted to understand things better, the brain to Andy's brawn. He remembers talking long into the nights with her while Joe and Andy slept. He would listen raptly as she told him of all the philosophers and thinkers she’d met from Greece to China. She’d even taught him how to use a bow properly and he remembers that the first time he’d picked up a sniper-rifle he had thoughtthat Quyhn would have loved them.

He wonders if she’s still the same person he remembers. 

They spend the next few days around the local area, the pace of life slower than the city but no less enjoyable. They swim during the morning and explore during the afternoon. The jetty becomes Nicky’s favourite place, his feet trailing in the water as the fireflies come out at night. Joe paints or sketches, telling Nicky that he’ll leave his favourite as a thank you present. 

Quynh hasn’t contacted him once while they’ve been there. 

A few nights in, they go to bed as they normally do but at midnight they startle awake to Joe’s phone ringing, both reach for weapons that aren’t there. There are only 6 people in the world that have that number. One of them is Nicky.

Nicky’s first thought is Andy and his heart plummets. 

Joe reaches across Nicky and answers it, he hears Andy’s mangled voice down the line but doesn’t pick up what she’s saying, brain still jumbled with sleep. 

Joe's arm around him tenses, and Nicky looks up at him as Joe says “no,” firmly to whatever Andy’s asked. Andy’s voice sounds tired down the line “I don’t care Andy,” he replies tersely. Nicky tries to take the phone from Joe, but Joe pulls away and moves to sit up. Now Nicky worries.

“Joe?” Nicky asks, and Joe looks at him clearly conflicted by something.

“You can say no,” he opens with, and Nicky knows it can’t be good. He sighs heavily as whatever Andy says and pulls the phone away from his ear. “Quyhn's had a… bad day, and Andy was wondering if you could talk to her. She thinks it might help.” It’s clear he’s unhappy with the idea of Nicky reliving unpleasant memories. 

Nick is reaching for the phone before he even realises it, “put her on the phone Andy,” he says around a yawn as he stands and heads for the jetty. Joe immediately moves to follow but Nicky shakes his head. This isn’t a conversation he wants to be overheard.

“Thank you, Nicky,” Andy says relieved. Nicky wants to tell her not to thank him yet, he doesn’t know if this is going to be a good idea. Nicky has always been the one to hear their families confessions but this time he doesn’t even know if he’s going to be able to remain civil. “I’m handing you over,” she says and he hears the background noise change.

Quynh doesn’t say anything and the silence stretches. After a minute, Nicky takes the plunge (pun intended).

“What happened?” he asks, stepping outside into the warm night air and sitting down. “Tell me Quynh,” he says quietly to the silence at the other end of the line. 

“Do you dream?” She finally asks quietly and sounds so broken on the phone.

It’s hard to hate someone when they’re hurting so much and you’ve had the first-hand experience of it as Nicky has. 

Yes, he has nightmares.  
“Sometimes. Sometimes I dream of drowning and everything burning at the same time,” he replies, he vaguely remembers salty water burning his slow healing body as he died over and over again. There’s a sound down the other end of the line that sounds like a mixture between a laugh and a cry and it breaks Nicky’s heart. No one should sound that broken. “What do you dream of?” He asks.

“... I don’t… and sometimes I wonder if this is the dream. I wonder if I’ve finally gone mad and if I go to sleep I’ll wake up back there.” 

Nicky’s heart shatters. No one, not even his enemy deserves that. 

“You are not dreaming. Both of us are above the waves.”

“How do you know?” She asks, desperate for any type of confirmation that she’s not mad.

“Because even your imagination couldn’t come up with half the storylines for those telenovelas that you like watching,” he says back without thinking. It’s clearly the right thing to say because there's a quiet huff of an almost laugh down the phone. 

The silence is back, but this time it’s lighter. Nicky wonders for a moment if he should hang up when Quyhn suddenly says; “I’m sorry for what I did.” 

Nicky isn’t ready for this conversation. Maybe not ever, but it seems he doesn’t have a choice. 

“Then why? Why did you do it?” He asks, he tries to dredge up the anger inside him that’s been so familiar, but it’s so exhausting to be angry all of the time.

“Do you really want to know?” She asks, giving him the out he could so easily take.

He looks out over the river and the rice fields with the night sky towering above him. Nicky doesn’t really want to continue having this conversation, but if this is going to be fixed then he needs to have it.

“Yes,” he says quietly.

“I wanted you all to hurt because it was only fair. I wanted you all to know what it felt like. But Andy was mortal, Booker had betrayed you and was banished, and Nile was too new for any of you to truly care if I took her. So it was you or Joe.” she says in a calm way that suggests there’s logic to her madness. 

“Why Joe?”

“Because he was easier to trick and in my madness I thought you’d forgive me quicker...”

It’s entirely Quynh. It’s brutal and it’s blisteringly honest.

… and if I’d taken you, I wouldn’t have got Andy back.” The last part surprises him, and although he’s silent his confusion must be palpable because she sighs, “get Joe to explain.”

She pauses, “Andy told me that when you went missing she thought it was the scales balancing. That they’d taken you from Joe because she got me back. She wouldn’t talk to me for months afterwards, thinking that if she punished herself by pushing me away, we’d get you back. And we did get you back, but the sea changed you just like it changed me. She told me about the last time someone separated you and Joe and how you both acted… You need to know I just wanted justice, I didn’t want to hurt you and I want to make this right.”

She clearly wants absolution, and tonight’s been a start, but it’s a long road.

“Goodnight Quynh,” he tells her, exhausted from such a short conversation, and hangs the phone up before she responds. He goes back into the bedroom to find Joe sitting on the bed. He closes the distance between them and Joe instinctively reaches out, grabbing Nicky's hips and bringing him in close, bracketing him in between the V of Joe's legs. Joe leans forward and his forehead rests on Nicky's stomach. His arms automatically come around Nicky’s waist, and Nicky’s fingers curl possessively around the top of Joe's neck, one hand threading through his hair while the other drops the phone on the stand. Nicky can almost feel the frown lines appear on Joe's forehead, even if he can’t see them.

“She’s right,” Joe says into Nicky's stomach. “I wouldn’t have forgiven her.”

Nicky isn’t really surprised that Joe was listening in on the call. It’s exactly the thing he would have done. 

“What did she mean?” Nicky asks. 

“If she had taken you, I’d have made Andy choose. I argues that we give Booker a hundred years for three days of mild torture and a betrayal. When she had me I thought she might have also taken you, and I told her that if she had... that if she hurt you….” he trails off but the understanding is clear. Joe would have done what Nicky couldn’t, he’d have made Andy choose who to spend her last remaining mortal years with. 

“Does it make me weaker, or less able for not doing that?” Nicky muses aloud.

Joe laughs and looks up at him, “forgiveness is a strength, not a weakness, and you my love are one of the strongest men I know. You are kind, and patient and believe in the fundamental goodness of things and doing right for right's sake. If anyone is capable of this it is you, and whatever you choose to do I will follow.”

Sometimes it is overwhelming for Nicky to realise just how entirely he is cherished. 

Nicky makes a decision. He makes it for Joe, for Andy and for Nile and Booker. Their little family is far from perfect, but it is all they have left. No one should carry the burden of their memories alone, and with family it can be more evenly carried.

He pulls back and reaches for the phone, sending off a quick text before putting it back and pushing Joe down onto the bed and laying down beside him. 

“We take the next mission and then we stay nearby, but not together,” Nicky decides for them both. Joe hums in agreement. Nile and Booker will understand, and it means they can see Andy. Quynh will take longer, but he’s willing to try.

For Joe- he will always be willing to try.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Random thoughts
> 
> 1) Writing Quynhs character was hard, I didn't know if I should base it of Noriko from the comics, but thought fuck it, I'll just write what I want.
> 
> 2) Still not 100% happy with the ending but meh... felt like I needed to finish it.
> 
> 3) Writing smexy scenes is hard and difficult and I'm shit at them.
> 
> 4) Soft/Nice characters that go Feral for a loved one is clearly a trope I subconsciously love

**Author's Note:**

> Need a beta for the next chapters- any volunteers?


End file.
